'Grief is no duty,' he wrote to Miss
Bell; 'it was all too beautiful for grief,' he said to me; but the
emotion, call it by what name we please, shook him to his depths;
his wife thought he would have broken his heart when he must
demolish the Captain's trophy in the dining-room, and he seemed
thenceforth scarcely the same man.
These last years were indeed years of an excessive demand upon his
vitality; he was not only worn out with sorrow, he was worn out by
hope. The singular invention to which he gave the name of
telpherage, had of late consumed his time, overtaxed his strength
and overheated his imagination. The words in which he first
mentioned his discovery to me - 'I am simply Alnaschar' - were not
only descriptive of his state of mind, they were in a sense
prophetic; since whatever fortune may await his idea in the future,
it was not his to see it bring forth fruit. Alnaschar he was
indeed; beholding about him a world all changed, a world filled
with telpherage wires; and seeing not only himself and family but
all his friends enriched.
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