Page:Ballantyne--The Battery and the Boiler.djvu/52

, but got into pecuniary difficulties, and went to New York to raise the wind. There he met with Cyrus Field, who took the matter up with tremendous enthusiasm. He expanded Gisborne's idea, and resolved to get up a company to connect Newfoundland with Ireland by electric cable. Field was rich and influential, and ultimately successful—"

"Ah! would that you and I were rich, Fred," interrupted Bob, as he let fall the ruler with a crash on the red-ink bottle, and overturned it; "but go on, Fred, I 'm getting interested; pardon the interruption, and never mind the ink, I 'll swab it up.—He was successful, was he?"

"Yes, he was; eminently so. He first of all roused his friends in the States, and got up, in 1856, the 'New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company,' which carried a line of telegraph through the British Provinces, and across the Gulf of St. Lawrence to St. John's, Newfoundland—more than 1000 miles—at a cost of about £500,000. Then he came over to England and roused the British Lion, with whose aid he started the 'Atlantic Telegraph Company,' and fairly began the work, backed by such men as Brett, Bidden, Stephenson, Brunei, Glass, Eliot, Morse, Bright, Whitehouse, and a host of others. But all this was not done in a day. Cyrus Field laboured for years among preliminaries,