Just as that ingenious little boy tried to help his friends by making their flatboat run faster so Robert Fulton, as a man, had made the people of the world richer, happier, and better for all the ages to come. [Illustration: THE “CLERMONT,” FULTON’S FIRST STEAMBOAT.] HOW MORSE SENT LETTERS BY LIGHTNING Into the family of Doctor Morse, a much respected minister living on the side of the hill on which the battle of Bunker Hill was fought, there came a little baby boy. They named him Samuel Finley for his great-grandfather, a president of Princeton College. To this was added Breese, the maiden name of the boy’s mother. When this baby grew up, he was known all over the world as S. F. B. Morse. This Morse boy had the best kind of schooling at home. His father was a teacher as well as a preacher, and wrote the Morse geographies which were used in the schools of that day. Finley, as he was called at home, showed real talent as a boy for drawing and painting. One of his first pictures showed the Morse family around a table, with the father teaching them from a large globe showing all the countries of the world. Finley Morse was sent to Yale College, where he was much interested in science and philosophy. But he kept at his drawing and coloring, and became a successful painter. That was years before any one knew how to take photographs; so Mr. Morse painted a great many portraits and did such good work that he received high prices for them. Believing that the artists of America could help one another, he influenced some of them to organize the National Academy of the Arts of Design, and they elected him their first president. When Lafayette, who had been a young officer on General Washington’s staff nearly fifty years before, came to America again as an old man, the people of America wished to have the best portrait that could be painted of the Frenchman who had helped the Americans in the War [Illustration: S. F. B. MORSE, INVENTOR OF THE TELEGRAPH.] for Independence. Finley Morse was chosen to paint this picture of General Lafayette. While Mr. Morse was in Washington at work on this picture, he received word from his home in New Haven that his young wife had died suddenly of heart disease. Before he could receive the letter she was buried. People in those days traveled by stage-coach, and it took at least a week for a letter to go from Boston to Washington. When the sorrowing father went home to arrange for the care of his three motherless children, he spoke of the slowness of sending word from place to place, and said he hoped the time would come when news could be sent long distances in an instant. But of course he had no idea then that he would have anything to do with bringing that blessing to mankind.