cattle and horses and milk
the cows. None of his men worked harder than he.

Although railroad building stimulated prices and gave activity to
business men, the flush times were followed by depression. To secure
the construction of a railway to the mast yard, Carleton subscribed
to the stock, and, under the individual liability law of that period,
was compelled to take as much more to relieve the company from debt.
Soon he found, however, in spite of hard work for both himself and his
wife, that farming and lumbering together rendered no adequate
returns. Relief to mind and body was found in the weekly arrival of
_Littell's Living Age_ and two or three weekly papers, in agricultural
meetings at Concord and Manchester, and in the formation of the State
Agricultural Society, of which Carleton was one of the founders.

CHAPTER V.

ELECTRICITY AND JOURNALISM.

The modern age of electricity was ushered in during Mr. Coffin's early
manhood. The telegraph, which has given the world a new nervous
system, being less an invention than an evolution, had from the labors
of Prof. Joseph Henry, in Albany, and of Wheatstone, of England,
become, by Morse's invention of the dot-and-line alphabet, a far-off
writer by which men could annihilate time and distance. One of the
first to experiment with the new power--old as eternity, but only
slowly revealed to man--was Carleton's brother-in-law, Prof. Moses G.
Farmer, whose services to science have never yet been adequately set
forth.

This inventor in 1851 invited Mr. Coffin to leave the farm
temporarily, to construct a line of wire connecting the telegraphs of
Boston with the Cambridge observatory, for the purpose of giving
uniform time to the railroads. In this Carleton was so successful
that, in the winter and spring of 1852, he was employed by Mr. Moses
Farmer to construct the telegraph fire alarm, which had been invented
by his brother-in-law. The work was completed in the month of May, and
Charles Carleton Coffin gave the first alarm of fire ever transmitted
by the electric apparatus. The system was a great curiosity, and many
distinguished men of this country, and from Europe, especially from
Russia and France, came to inspect its working.

Commodore Charles Wilkes, of the United States Navy, who had returned
from his brilliant expedition in Antarctic regions, but who had not
yet made himself notorious by a capture of the Confederate
commissioners, proposed to use thi