"January 27. Your favor of the 21st was received yesterday.  I was sorry that you allowed your feelings to be so much aroused in the case of contemplated difficulties between our hands and those of O’Reilly.  They held out the threats that we should not pass them, and we were determined to do it.  I had them notified that we were prepared to meet them under any circumstances.  We were prepared to have a real ‘hug,’ but, when our hands overtook them, they only ‘yelled’ a little and mine followed, and for fifteen miles they were side by side, and when a man finished his hole, he ran with all his might to get ahead.  But finally, on the 24th, we passed them about eighty miles from here, and now we are about twenty-five miles ahead of them without the loss of a drop of blood, and we shall be able to beat them to Nashville, if we can get the wire in time, which is doubtful.”

There were many such stirring incidents in the early history of the telegraph, and the half of them has not been told, thus leaving much material for the future historian.

But, while so much that was exciting was taking place in the outside world, the cause of it all was turning his thoughts towards matters more domestic.  On June 13, he writes to his brother:  “Charles left me for Utica last evening, and Finley and I go this evening to be present at his marriage on Thursday the 15th.”

It was at his son’s wedding that he was again strongly attracted to his young second cousin (or, to be more exact, his first cousin once removed), the first cousin of his son’s bride, and the result is announced to his brother in a letter of August 7:  “Before your return I shall be again married.  I leave to-morrow for Utica where cousin (second cousin) Sarah Elizabeth Griswold now is.  On Thursday morning the 10th we shall (God willing) be married, and I shall immediately proceed to Louisville and Frankfort in Kentucky to be present at my first suit against O’Reilly, the pirate of my invention.  It comes off on the 23d inst.  So far as the justice of the case is concerned I am confident of final success, but there are so many crooks in the law that I ought to be prepared for disappointment.”

Continuing, he tells his brother that he has been secretly in love with his future wife for some years:  “But, reflecting on it, I found I was in no situation to indulge in any plans of marrying.  She had nothing, I had nothing, and the more I loved her the more I was determined to stifle my feelings without hinting to her anything of the matter, or letting her know that I was at all interested in her.”

But now, with increasing wealth, the conditions were changed, and so they were married, and in their case it can with perfect truth be said, “They lived happy ever after,” and failed by but a year of being able to celebrate their silver wedding.  Soon a young family grew up around him, to whom he was always a patient and loving father.  We his children undoubtedly gave him many an anxious moment, as children have a habit of doing, but through all his trials, domestic as well as extraneous, he was calm, wise, and judicious.