was deemed necessary by Morse to
complete his first circuit. The first wire was of copper.

The first message, now in the custody of the Connecticut Historical
Society, was dictated by Miss Annie G. Ellsworth, and the words of it
were "What hath God wrought?" The telegraph was at first regarded with
superstitious dread in some sections of the country. In a Southern State
a drought was attributed to its occult influences, and the people,
infatuated with the idea, levelled the wires to the ground. And so
common was it for the Indians to knock off the insulators with their
rifles in order to gratify their curiosity in regard to the "singing
cord," that it was at first extremely difficult to keep the lines in
repair along the Pacific Railway.

To the man who had been so poor that he had had a very great struggle to
provide bread for his three motherless children, came now success. The
impecunious artist was liberally rewarded for his clever invention, and
in 1847 he married for his second wife Miss Sarah E. Griswold, of
Poughkeepsie, the daughter of his cousin. She was twenty-five when they
were married, and he fifty-six, but they lived very happily together on
the two-hundred acre farm he had bought near Poughkeepsie, and it was
there that he died at the age of seventy-two, full of honours as an
inventor, and loving art to the end.

Even after he became a great man, Professor Morse, it is interesting to
learn, cherished his fondness for the house in which he was born, and
one of his last visits to Charlestown was on the occasion when he took
his young daughter to see the old place. And that same day, one is a bit
amused to note, he took her also to the old parsonage, then still
standing, in what is now Harvard Street, between the city hall and the
church--and there pointed out to her with pride some rude sketches he
had made on the wall of his sleeping-room when still a boy. So, though
it is as an inventor we remember and honour Samuel Finley Breese Morse
to-day, it was as a painter that he wished first, last, and above all to
be famous. But in the realm of the talents as elsewhere man proposes and
God disposes.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 10: Drake's "Historic Fields and Mansions of Middlesex."
Little, Brown & Co., publishers.]

[Footnote 11: Beacon Biographies: S. F. B. Morse, by John Trowbridge;
Small, Maynard & Co.]

WHERE THE "BROTHERS AND SISTERS" MET

No single house in all Massachusetts has survived so