showed itself in a greater strain and a more rapid tendency to run fast.  We could check its speed, but it is a dangerous process. Too sudden a check would inevitably snap the cable.  Too slack a rein would allow of its egress at such a wasting rate and at such a violent speed that we should lose too great a portion of the cable, and its future stopping within controllable limits be almost impossible.  Hence our anxiety.  All were on the alert; our expert engineers applied the brakes most judiciously, and at the moment I write—­latitude 52 deg. 28’—­the cable is being laid at the depth of two miles in its ocean bed as regularly and with as much facility as it was in the depth of a few fathoms....

“Six P.M. We have just had a fearful alarm.  ‘Stop her!  Stop her!’ was reiterated from many voices on deck.  On going up I perceived the cable had got out of its sheaves and was running out at great speed.  All was confusion for a few moments.  Mr. Canning, our friend, who was the engineer of the Newfoundland cable, showed great presence of mind, and to his coolness and skill, I think, is due the remedying of the evil.  By rope stoppers the cable was at length brought to a standstill, and it strained most ominously, perspiring at every part great tar drops.  But it held together long enough to put the cable on the sheaves again.”

“Tuesday, August 11. Abruptly indeed am I stopped in my letter.  This morning at 3.45 the cable parted, and we shall soon be on our way back to England.”

Thus ended the first attempt to unite the Old World with the New by means of an electric nerve.  Authorities differ as to who was responsible for the disaster, but the cause was proved to be what Morse had foreseen when he wrote:  “Too sudden a check would inevitably snap the cable.”

While, of course, disappointed, he was not discouraged, for under date of August 13, he writes:—­

“Our accident will delay the enterprise but will not defeat it.  I consider it a settled fact, from all I have seen, that it is perfectly practicable.  It will surely be accomplished.  There is no insurmountable difficulty that has for a moment appeared, none that has shaken my faith in it in the slightest degree.  My report to the company as co-electrician will show everything right in that department.  We got an electric current through till the moment of parting, so that electric connection was perfect, and yet the farther we paid out the feebler were the currents, indicating a difficulty which, however, I do not consider serious, while it is of a nature to require attentive investigation.”

“Plymouth, August 17. Here I am still held by the leg and lying in my berth from which I have not moved for six days.  I suffer but little pain unless I attempt to sit up, and the healing process is going on most favorably but slowly....  I have been here three days and have not yet had a glimpse of the beautiful country that surrounds us, and if we should be ordered to another port before I can be out I shall have as good an idea of Plymouth as I should have at home looking at a map.”