He came down to breakfast the next morning with a very sad face, hardly knowing how he was to pay his board and get home. He was met by a young lady, Miss Annie Ellsworth, who came to him with a smile. "Let me congratulate you, Mr. Morse," she said. "For what, my dear friend?" "For the passage of your bill." "What!" he said, in great astonishment; "the passage of my bill?" "Yes; do you not know of it?" "No; it cannot be true!" "You came home too early last night, Mr. Morse. Your bill has passed, and I am happy to be the first to bring you the good news." "You give me new life, Miss Ellsworth," he said. "For your good news I promise you this: when my telegraph line is laid, you shall have the honor of selecting the first message to be sent over it." Congress had granted only thirty thousand dollars. It was not much, but Morse went actively to work. He wanted to dig a ditch to lay his pipe in, through which the wire was to run. He got another inventor to help him, Ezra Cornell, who afterwards founded Cornell University. Mr. Cornell invented a machine which dug the ditch at a great rate, laid the pipe, and covered it in. In five minutes it laid and covered one hundred feet of pipe. But Cornell did not think the underground wire would work. "It will work," said Morse. "While I have been fighting Congress, men have laid short lines in England which work very well. What can be done there can be done here." For all that, it would not work. A year passed and only seven thousand dollars of the money were left, and all the wires laid were of no use. "If it won't go underground we must try and coax it to go over-ground," said Morse. Poles were erected; the wire was strung on glass insulators; it now worked to a charm. On May 11, 1844, the Whig National Convention at Baltimore nominated Henry Clay for President, and the news was sent to Washington in all haste by the first railroad train. But the passengers were surprised to find that they brought stale news; everybody in Washington knew it already. It had reached there an hour or two before by telegraph. That was a great triumph for Morse. The telegraph line was not then finished quite to Baltimore. When it reached there, on May 24th, the first message sent was one which Miss Ellsworth had chosen from the Bible, "What hath God wrought?" God had wrought wonderfully indeed, for since then the electric wire has bound the ends of the earth together. If I should attempt to tell you about all our inventors I am afraid it would be a long story. There is almost no end to them, and many of them invented wonderful machines. I might tell you, for instance, about Thomas Blanchard, who invented the machine by which tacks are made, dropping them down as fast as a watch can tick. This is only one out of many of his inventions. One of them was a steamboat to run in shallow water, and which could go hundreds of miles up rivers where Fulton's steamboat would have run aground.