. While
engaged in this examination, the idea flashed across his mind that
instead of undertaking such a complicated scheme, it would be better to
attempt to stretch a telegraph wire entirely across the ocean, from the
shores of Newfoundland to the coast of Ireland. The vastness of this
scheme pleased him, and its usefulness to the entire world, if it could
be carried out, was clear to his mind from the first.

He at once set to work to ascertain if such an undertaking as an
Atlantic telegraph was practicable. He wrote to Lieutenant Maury, then
the Chief of the National Observatory at Washington, and asked if the
laying of such a wire was possible; and to Professor Morse, the inventor
of the telegraph, to know if such a wire would be available for sending
messages if it could be laid. Lieutenant Maury promptly replied,
inclosing a copy of a report he had just made to the Secretary of the
Navy on the subject, from which Mr. Field learned that the idea of
laying a telegraph across the ocean was not original with himself. In
this report Lieutenant Maury demonstrated the entire practicability of
such an enterprise, and sustained his conclusions by a statement of the
recent discoveries concerning the bed of the ocean, made by Lieutenant
Berryman. Professor Morse came in person to visit Mr. Field, and assured
him of his entire faith in the possibility of sending telegraphic
messages across the ocean with rapidity and success.

The two highest authorities in the world thus having assured him of the
entire practicability of the undertaking, Mr. Field declared his
readiness, if he could procure the assistance of a sufficient number of
capitalists in the United States, to undertake the laying of a telegraph
across the Atlantic between Europe and America. Further deliberation
only made him better satisfied with the undertaking, and he set to work
to find ten capitalists, each of whom he proposed should contribute one
hundred thousand dollars, making the capital of the proposed company one
million of dollars. Mr. Field was convinced that the undertaking would
be expensive, but he had then but a faint conception of its magnitude,
and was very far from supposing that "he might yet be drawn on to stake
upon its success the whole fortune he had accumulated; that he was to
sacrifice for it all the peace and quiet he had hoped to enjoy, and that
for twelve years he was to be almost without a home, crossing and
recrossing the sea, urging