[Illustration:  TELEGRAM SHOWING MORSE’S CHARACTERISTIC DEADHEAD, WHICH HE ALWAYS USED TO FRANK HIS MESSAGES]

“So far as the Russian Extension is concerned, I should judge from your representation that, as a stockholder in that enterprise to the amount of $30,000, the plan would conduce to my immediate pecuniary benefit.  But so would the robbery of the safe of a bank.  If wealth can be obtained only by such swindles, I prefer poverty.  You have my proxy and I have the utmost confidence in your management.  Do by me as you would do for yourself, and I shall be satisfied....  In regard to any honorable propositions made in the Board be conciliatory and compromising, but any scheme to oppress the smaller stockholders for the benefit of the larger resist to the death.  I prefer to sacrifice all my stock rather than have such a stigma on my character as such mean, and I will add villainous, conduct would be sure to bring upon all who engaged in it.”

In this connection I shall also quote from another letter to Mr. Sanford, of February 15, 1867:  “If Government thinks seriously of purchasing the Telegraph, and at this late day adopting my early suggestion that it ought to belong to the Post-Office Department, be it so if they will now pay for it.  They must now pay millions for that which I offered to them for one hundred thousand dollars, and gave them a year for consideration ere they adopted it.”

There are but few references to politics in the letters of this period, but I find the following in a letter of March 20, 1866, to a cousin:  “You ask my opinion of our President.  I did not vote for him, but I am agreeably surprised at his masterly statesmanship, and hope, by his firmness in resisting the extreme radicals, he will preserve the Union against now the greatest enemies we have to contend against.  I mean those who call themselves Abolitionists....  President Johnson deserves the support of all true patriots, and he will have it against all the ‘traitors’ in the country, by whatever soft names of loyalty they endeavor to shield themselves.”

Appeals of all kinds kept pouring in on him, and, in courteously refusing one, on April 17, he uses the following language:  “I am unable to aid you.  I cannot, indeed, answer a fiftieth part of the hundreds of applications made to me from every section of the country daily—­I might say hourly—­for yours is the third this morning and it is not yet 12 o’clock.”

After settling his affairs at home in his usual methodical manner, Morse sailed with his wife and his four young children, and Colonel John R. Leslie their tutor, for Europe on the 23d of June, 1866, prepared for an extended stay.  He wished to give his children the advantages of travel and study in Europe, and he was very desirous of being in Paris during the Universal Exposition of 1867.

There is a gap in the letter-books until October, 1866, but from the few letters to members of the family which have been preserved, and from my own recollections, we know that the summer of 1866 was most delightfully spent in journeying through France, Germany, and Switzerland.  The children were now old enough not to be the nuisances they seem to have been in 1858, for we find no note of complaint on that account.