My means were very limited--so limited as to preclude the possibility of constructing an apparatus of such mechanical finish as to warrant my success in venturing upon its public exhibition.

I had no wish to expose to ridicule the representative of so many hours of laborious thought.
"Prior to the summer of 1837, at which time Mr.Alfred Vail's attention became attracted to my telegraph, I depended upon my pencil for subsistence.

Indeed, so straitened were my circumstances that, in order to save time to carry out my invention and to economize my scanty means, I had for months lodged and eaten in my studio, procuring my food in small quantities from some grocery, and preparing it myself.

To conceal from my friends the stinted manner in which I lived, I was in the habit of bringing my food to my room in the evenings, and this was my mode of life for many years." Nearly twenty years later, in 1853, Morse referred to this trying period in his career at a meeting of the Association of the Alumni of the University:-- "Yesternight, on once more entering your chapel, I saw the same marble staircase and marble floors I once so often trod, and so often with a heart and head overburdened with almost crushing anxieties.

Separated from the chapel by but a thin partition was that room I occupied, now your Philomathean Hall, whose walls--had thoughts and mental struggles, with the alternations of joys and sorrows, the power of being daguerreotyped upon them--would show a thickly studded gallery of evidence that there the Briarean infant was born who has stretched forth his arms with the intent to encircle the world.