The day that this was written, Mr. Field landed at Portsmouth, and at once hastened to London to meet the Directors. At first it was a question if they should renew the expedition this year. But their brief experience had shown the need of more ample preparations for their next attempt. They required six hundred miles more of cable to make up for over three hundred lost in the sea, and to provide a surplus so as to run no risk of falling short from other accidents; and most of all they needed better machinery to pay out the cable into the ocean. These preparations required time, and before they could be made, it would be late in the autumn. Hence they reluctantly decided to defer the expedition till another year. The Niagara and the Agamemnon therefore discharged their cable at Plymouth, whence the Niagara returned home; and Mr. Field, after remaining a few weeks in London to complete the preparations for the next year, sailed for America. He returned to find that a commercial hurricane had swept over the country, in which a thousand stately fortunes had gone down, and in which the wealth he had accumulated by years of toil had nearly suffered shipwreck. Such were the tidings that met him on landing. It had been a year of disappointments in England and America--of disasters on land and sea--and all his high hopes were In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. FOOTNOTES: [A] Mr. Field was detained by illness at Valentia, and several of the ships had not arrived. CHAPTER IX. THE FIRST EXPEDITION OF 1858.