Yet after the inventor had made his discovery he had the greatest difficulty in getting a chance to demonstrate its worth. Heartsick with despondency, and with his means utterly exhausted, he finally applied to the Twenty-seventh Congress for aid to put his invention to the test of practical illustration, and his petition was carried through with a majority of only two votes! These two votes to the good were enough, however, to save the wonderful discovery, perhaps from present obscurity, and with the thirty thousand dollars appropriated by Congress Morse stretched his first wires from Washington to Baltimore--wires, it will be noted, because the principle of the ground circuit was not then known, and only later discovered by accident. So that a wire to go and another to return between the cities was deemed necessary by Morse to complete his first circuit. The first wire was of copper. The first message, now in the custody of the Connecticut Historical Society, was dictated by Miss Annie G. Ellsworth, and the words of it were "What hath God wrought?" The telegraph was at first regarded with superstitious dread in some sections of the country. In a Southern State a drought was attributed to its occult influences, and the people, infatuated with the idea, levelled the wires to the ground. And so common was it for the Indians to knock off the insulators with their rifles in order to gratify their curiosity in regard to the "singing cord," that it was at first extremely difficult to keep the lines in repair along the Pacific Railway. To the man who had been so poor that he had had a very great struggle to provide bread for his three motherless children, came now success. The impecunious artist was liberally rewarded for his clever invention, and in 1847 he married for his second wife Miss Sarah E. Griswold, of Poughkeepsie, the daughter of his cousin. She was twenty-five when they were married, and he fifty-six, but they lived very happily together on the two-hundred acre farm he had bought near Poughkeepsie, and it was there that he died at the age of seventy-two, full of honours as an inventor, and loving art to the end. Even after he became a great man, Professor Morse, it is interesting to learn, cherished his fondness for the house in which he was born, and one of his last visits to Charlestown was on the occasion when he took his young daughter to see the old place. And that same day, one is a bit amused to note, he took her also to the old parsonage, then still standing, in what is now Harvard Street, between the city hall and the church--and there pointed out to her with pride some rude sketches he had made on the wall of his sleeping-room when still a boy. So, though it is as an inventor we remember and honour Samuel Finley Breese Morse to-day, it was as a painter that he wished first, last, and above all to be famous. But in the realm of the talents as elsewhere man proposes and God disposes. FOOTNOTES: