of brakes on his Agamemnon cable, a second and a third breaking of the
cable at sea, the cessation of the current in a well-laid cable, the
snapping of a superior cable on the Great Eastern--all these availed not
to foil the iron will of Field, whose final triumph was that of mental
energy in the application of science.


FOUR NEW YORK JOURNALISTS.

To Horace Greeley, the founder of the "Tribune," I need not allude; his
story is or ought to be in every school-book.

James Brooks, once the editor and proprietor of the "Daily Express," and
later an eminent congressman, began life as a clerk in a store in Maine,
and when twenty-one received for his pay a hogshead of New England rum.
He was so eager to go to college that he started for Waterville with his
trunk on his back, and when he was graduated he was so poor and plucky
that he carried his trunk on his back to the station as he went home.

When James Gordon Bennett was forty years old he collected all his
property, three hundred dollars, and in a cellar with a board upon two
barrels for a desk, himself his own typesetter, office boy, publisher,
newsboy, clerk, editor, proofreader, and printer's devil, he started the
"New York Herald." He did this, after many attempts and defeats in
trying to follow the routine, instead of doing his own way. Never was
any man's early career a better illustration of Wendell Phillips'
dictum: "What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first
steps to something better."

Thurlow Weed, who was a journalist for fifty-seven years, strong,