the bent of his inclination. He became greatly interested in physical
science, and was also a patron of the liberal arts. His home was stored
with the most beautiful products of the manufacturer's skill in fictile
arts, and on its walls hung the most approved examples of the painter's
skill. The looms of Holland and France and England furnished him with
their delicate and sumptuous tapestries, and the Orient covered his
floors with the richest and most prized carpets of Daghestan and
Trebizond, and of Bokhara.

But even more marked than his love for art was his passion for physical
science. His opportunities for the indulgence of this taste were
unlimited, and the reinforcement of his natural aptitude by his great
means enabled him to carry on experiments upon a scale of the most
magnificent proportions. These experiments were made in a large
building which was especially built for this object. It contained every
facility for his various new designs, and in it he anticipated many
advances in electrical science and in mechanical devices, which have
made the civilization of our day so remarkable. I recall distinctly as a
boy his ingenious approximation to the telephone, and even the recent
advances in wireless telegraphy, which has been the instrumentality by
which my own researches in the field of interplanetary telegraphy have
been prosecuted, had been realized by himself.

It was in the midst of a life almost ideally happy that the blow fell
which drove him and myself, then a boy and his only child, into a
retirement which resulted in the discoveries I am about to relate. My
father's devotion to my mother was an illustration of the most beautiful
and tender love that a man can bear toward a woman. It was adoration.
Though his mind was employed upon the abstruse questions of physics
which he investigated, or edified by new acquisitions in art, all his