"I cannot tell you how I have felt since our new success. It is only seventeen months since I first walked up to the top of the paddle-box of this ship at Sheerness upon a dark, rainy night, reviewed my past career in my mind, and tried to look into the future, to see what I had undertaken, and realize, if possible, what the new step in my career would develop. I cannot say I believed much in cables; I rather think I did not; but I did believe your husband was an earnest man of great force of character, and working under a strong conviction that what he was attempting was thoroughly practicable; and I knew enough of the names with which he had associated himself in the enterprise to feel that it was a real, true, honest effort, worthy of all the energy and application of one's manhood, and, come what might of the future, I resolved to do my very utmost and do nothing else until it was over. More completely, however, than my resolve foreshadowed, I dropped, inch by inch, or step by step, into the work, until I had no mind, no soul, no sleep, that was not tinged with cable. I am fortunate that my duties were such that I might well ask a blessing upon it, or I had better never have gone to church or bent a knee--in a word, I accuse your husband of having pulled me into a vortex that I could not get out of, and did not wish to try. And only fancy that the sum total of all this is to lay a thread across an ocean! Dr. Russell compared it to an elephant stretching a cobweb. And there lay its very danger. The more you multiply the mechanism the more you increase the risk. With all the vigilance and honesty of purpose of chosen men, exigencies must arise and may occur. When the nights are dark and stormy there comes the torture that may ruin all if not successfully met. And so that task has been a series of high hopes and blank, dark hours of disappointments, when it seemed as if the difficulties were legion and we were beating the air. Mr. Field, at least, never gave out. He never ceased to say, 'It would all come right,' even when his looks hardly bore out the assertion. But at last it did. We came through it all, and I feel as if I had said good-bye and God bless you to a wayward child who had cost me great thought and was at last happily settled for life just where I wished her. I do not think, though, that I could or would have nursed the wretch for twelve years, as your husband has done, to the destruction of the repose of himself and all the rest of his family. I should have discarded her and adopted some other. He has persevered, however, and to him belongs all the credit your country can bestow." Professor Wheatstone wrote: