The Doctor took Margaret out every pleasant afternoon. His practice was not large enough to work him very severely. In the evening they read or sang, as she played very nicely now. But she missed the breezy boys and their doings, and her mother's cheery voice ordering every one about, and, oh, she missed the little girl who didn't come half often enough. She began a choice piece of work for her, a silk quilt. No one had gone insane over crazy work then. This was shapely, decorous diamonds, with the name of the wearer, or a date, embroidered on each block. The Morgans had given her pieces from Paris and Venice and Holland, and even Hong Kong. Some were a hundred and more years old, and were gowns of quite famous people. This fall the American Institute Fair was held at Niblo's Garden. There were many curious things. Both telegraphs had been put up,--House's with its letter printing, Morse's with its cabalistic signs. How words could travel through a bit of wire puzzled most people. Uncle Faid went with them one afternoon. "No use to tell me," he declared. "The fellow at one end knows just what the fellow at the other end is going to say. Now if they sent it in a box, or a letter, it would look reasonable." "I'll send you a message," said Ben; "you go down at the end, and see if this doesn't come to you." He wrote on a slip of paper, and gave it to Uncle Faid, who went to the other end with a disbelieving shake of the head. And when the receiver wrote it out, and Uncle Faid compared it, the astonishment was indescribable. "There's some jugglery about it," he still insisted. "Stands to reason a bit of wire can't really know what you say." Hanny brought home her telegraph message; and when she showed it to Nora Whitney, the child declared it was like the queer things in some books her papa had, called hieroglyphics. But Doctor Joe told her a stranger thing than that. He found the verses in the Psalms that were supposed to prefigure the telegraph:-- "There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. "Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world." "But they can't go across the ocean," said the little girl, confidently. "Why, they are discussing the feasibility of crossing the Hudson with some kind of sunken cable. What we shall be doing fifty years from now--and I shall not be such a dreadfully old man! We are learning how to live longer as well." Fifty years! and she would be as old as the grandmothers! The other wonderful thing was the sewing-machine. Elias Howe had learned how to thread the needle, the opposite way, by putting the eye in the point. There was a little bent piece underneath that caught the loop while a thread ran through it. They gave away samples, and everybody admitted that it _was_ wonderful.