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lation between magnetism and electricity. From 1820 to 1825, his discovery was further developed by Davy and Sturgeon of England, and Arago and Ampere of France. The electro-magnetic telegraph is the embodiment, I might say the incarnation, of many centuries of thought, of many generations of effort to elicit from Nature one of her deepest mysteries. No one man, no one century, could have achieved it. It is the child of the human race, the heir of all ages. How wonderful are the steps that led to its creation! The very name of this telegraphic instrument bears record of its history-Electric, Magnetic.

"The first, named from the bit of yellow amber whose qualities of attraction and repulsion were discovered by a Grecian philosopher twenty-four centuries ago, and the second, from Magnesia, the village of Asia Minor where first was found the lodestone, whose touch turned the needle forever toward the north. These were the earliest forms in which that subtle, all-pervading force revealed itself to men. In the childhood of the race men stood dumb in the presence of its more terrible manifestations. When it gleamed in the purple aurora, or shot dusky-red from the clouds, it was the eye-flash of an angry God before whom mortals quailed in helpless fear."

More than three centuries ago, Shakspeare put into the mouth of one of his creations the words,

"I'll put a girdle round about the earth

In forty minutes."

The words spoken in jest were in the nature of prophecy. After the passing of many generations, in a country unknown to the great bard, Morse, in the words of Mr. Cox, one of the most eloquent of his eulogists

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Gave to the universal people the means of speedy and accurate intelligence, and so stormed at once the castles of the terrible Giant Doubt and Giant Despair. He has saved time, shortened the hours of toil, accumulated and intensified thought by the rapidity and terseness of electric messages. He has celebrated treaties. Go to the uttermost parts of the earth; go beneath the deep sea; to the land where snows are eternal, or to the tropical realms where the orange blooms in the air of mid-winter, and you will find this clicking, persistent, sleepless instrument ready to give its tireless wing to your purpose."

It was my good fortune to serve in the House of Representatives with Mr. Stephens of Georgia, and Mr. Wood of New York, both of whom more than a third of a century before

had given their votes in favor of the appropriation that made it possible for Morse to prosecute experiments fraught with such stupendous blessing to our race. The member who reported back the bill from the Committee on Commerce, with favorable recommendations, and then supported it by an eloquent speech upon the floor of the House, was Robert C. Winthrop of Massachusetts. No public man I have ever known impressed me more favorably than did Mr. Winthrop. He had been the close friend of Everett, Choate, Webster, and Clay. He was the last survivor of as brilliant a coterie of party leaders and statesmen as our country has ever known. On a visit he made to the House of Representatives, of which he had many years before been the Speaker, business was at once suspended, and the members from all parts of the Great Hall gathered about him. In a letter to the Morse Memorial meeting in Boston, Mr. Winthrop stated that he was present in the Capitol while the first formal messages were passing along the magic cords between Washington and Baltimore. He referred to the declination read by Senator Wright in his presence, of the nomination to the Vice-Presidency tendered him, and added:

"All this gave us the most vivid impression, not only that a new kind of wire-pulling had entered into politics, but that a mysterious and marvellous power of the air had at length been subdued and trained to the service of mankind."

It is an interesting fact in this connection, to note that the little girl, Miss Ellsworth, who brought to Mr. Morse the joyful tidings of the passage of the bill on that early May morning in 1843, was rewarded by being requested by the great inventor to write the first message that ever passed over the wire. When she selected,

"What hath God wrought,

words to find utterance by all tongues - she builded better than she knew, for in the words of Speaker Blaine:

"The little thread of wire placed as a timid experiment between the national capital and a neighboring city grew, and lengthened, and multiplied with almost the rapidity of the electric current that darted along its iron nerves, until, within his own

lifetime, continent was bound to continent, hemisphere answered through ocean's depths to hemisphere, and an encircled globe flashed forth his eulogy in the unmatched eloquence of a grand achievement."

Words of praise, spoken by Dr. Prime, of the great inventor just after he had passed from the world, to which he left such a heritage, can never lose their interest:

"Morse in his coffin is a recollection never to fade. He lay like an ancient prophet or sage such as the old masters painted for Abraham, or Isaiah. His finely chiselled features, classical in their mould and majestic in repose, and heavy flowing beard; the death calm upon the brow that for eighty years had concealed a teeming brain, and that placid beauty that lingers upon the face of the righteous dead, as if the freed spirit had left a smile upon its forsaken home these are the memories that remain of the most illustrious and honored private citizen that the New World has yet given to mankind."

IX

ALONG THE BYPATHS OF HISTORY

THE WIDOW OF GEN. GAINES CLAIMS PROPERTY AT NEW ORLEANS

WORTH $30,000,000 — HER SUCCESS AFTER MUCH LITIGATION

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THE WIDOW OF JOHN H. EATON, SECRETARY OF WAR A CLOUD ON HER REPUTATION HER HUSBAND A FRIEND OF GEN. JACKSON A DUEL BETWEEN RANDOLPH AND CLAY HOSTILITY OF THE LEADERS OF WASHINGTON SOCIETY TO MRS. EATON SECRETARY EATON DISLIKED BY HIS COLLEAGUES-CONSEQUENT DISRUPTION OF JACKSON'S CABINET MRS. EATON'S POVERTY IN HER OLD AGE.

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EARLY a third of a century ago, as the guest in a Washington home, I had the opportunity of meeting Mrs. Gaines, the widow of General Edmund P. Gaines, a distinguished officer of the War of 1812, and Mrs. Eaton, the widow of the Hon. John H. Eaton of Tennessee, for a number of years a Senator from that State, and later Secretary of War during the administration of President Jackson. Their names suggesting interesting events in our history, I gladly availed myself of the invitation to meet them.

I found Mrs. Gaines an old lady of small stature, with a profusion of curls, and gifted with rare powers of conversation. She spoke freely of her great lawsuits, one of which was then pending in the Supreme Court of the United States. As I listened, I thought of the wonderful career of the little woman before me. Few names, a half-century ago, were more familiar to the reading public than that of Myra Clark Gaines. She was born in New Orleans in the early days of the century; was the daughter of Daniel Clark, who died in 1813, the owner of a large portion of the land upon which the city of New Orleans was afterwards built. She was his only heir, and soon after attaining her majority, instituted a suit, or series of suits, for the recovery of her property. After years of litigation, the seriously controverted fact of her being the lawful heir of Daniel Clark was established, and the con

test, which was to wear out two generations of lawyers, began in dead earnest. The value of the property involved in the litigation then exceeded thirty millions of dollars. At the time I saw her, she had just arrived from her home in New Orleans to be present at the argument of one of her suits in the Supreme Court. She had already received nearly six millions of dollars by successful litigation, and she assured me that she intended to live one hundred years longer, if necessary, to obtain her rights, and that she expected to recover every dollar to which she was rightfully entitled. The air of confidence with which she spoke, and the pluck manifested in her every word and motion, convinced me at once that the only possible question as to her ultimate success was that of time. And so indeed it proved, for,

"When like a clock worn out with eating time, The wheels of weary life at last stood still," numerous suits, in which she had been successful in the lower courts, were still pending in the higher.

She told me with apparent satisfaction, during the interview, that she could name over fifty lawyers who had been against her since the beginning of her contest, all of whom were now in their graves. Her litigation was the one absorbing thought of her life, her one topic of conversation.

General Gaines had died many years before, and her legal battles, - extending through several decades and against a host of adversaries,— she had, with courage unfaltering and patience that knew no shadow of weariness, prosecuted single-handed and alone.

In view of the enormous sums involved, the length of time consumed in the litigation, the number and ability of counsel engaged, and the antagonisms engendered, the records of our American courts will be searched in vain for a parallel to the once famous suit of Myra Clark Gaines against the city of New Orleans.

At the close of this interview, I was soon in conversation with the older of the two ladies. Mrs. Eaton was then near the close of an eventful life, one indeed without an approximate parallel in our history. Four score years ago, there

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