eeming to drop from him as he went. He was almost
ready to give up the fight, and devote himself for the
future solely to brush and pencil.

He slept but poorly that night, and rose the next morning
still depressed and gloomy. He appeared at the
breakfast-table with a face from which the very color of
ambition seemed to have been washed out. As he entered the
room he was met by a young lady, Miss Annie G. Ellsworth,
daughter of the Commissioner of Patents. The smile on her
beaming face was in striking contrast to the gloom on his
downcast countenance.

"I have come to congratulate you, Mr. Morse," she said,
cheerily.

"For what, my dear friend?"

"For the passage of your bill."

"What!" he gazed at her amazement. Could she be attempting a
foolish and cruel jest? "The passage of my bill!" he
faltered.

"Yes. Do you not know of it?"

"No."

"Then you came home too early last night. And I am happy in
being the first to bring you the good news. Congress has
granted your claim."

It was true: he had been remembered in the will of the
expiring Congress. In the last hour of the Senate, amid the
roar of the deluge of public business, his small demand had
floated into sight, and thirty thousand dollars had been
voted him for the construction of an experimental telegraph
line.

"You have given me new life, Miss Ellsworth," he said. "As
a reward for your good tidings I promise you that when my
telegraph line is completed, you shall have the honor of
choosing the first message to be sent over it."

The inventor was highly elated, and not without reason.
Since the morning of the conversation on the ship Sully,
eleven and a half years had passed. They had been years of
such struggle against poverty and discouragement as only a
man who is the slave of an idea has the hardihood to endure.
The annals of invention contain many such instances; more,
perhaps, than can be found in any other channel of human
effort.

To complete our story we have to bring another inventor upon
the stage. This was Ezra Cornell, memorable to-day as the
founder of Cornell University, a man at that time unknown,
but filled with inventive ideas, and ready to undertake any
task that might offer itself, from digging a well to boring
a mountain tunnel. One day Mr. Cornell, who was at that time
occupying the humble position of traveling agent for a
patent plough, called at the office of an agricultural
newspaper in Portland, Maine. He found th