the 4th of April, one month later, he lay a corpse in the national capitol. Worn out by the excitement and labors of the election, he died before the country knew how well he would have filled his high office. In the event of the death of the president, the vice-president takes his place. John Tyler now came forward to take the chair from which his colleague had been so suddenly removed by death. He had been elected by the Whigs, and they naturally expected him to be their ally. But for some cause or other he disappointed their hopes, and very soon was acting in open alliance with the Democratic party which had held the power so many years before Harrison's election. The most important event which occurred in Tyler's time was the introduction of telegraphy, which now followed the two great inventions of steamboats and railways. John Tyler Like all the great inventions, the telegraph had been many years growing to perfection. Benjamin Franklin, flying his kite to the clouds to draw the lightning down, had done something toward the series of discoveries which helped make the telegraph. From his day, the wise men of France, Germany, Russia, Spain, England, and America, had been making experiments with electricity, galvanic batteries, and many other machines, which you and I do not very well understand, all of which helped on to the telegraph. Franklin himself had sent lightning across the Schuylkill River on a wire, and some Spanish experimenters had sent a message on a wire twenty-six miles long, as early as 1798. After the idea had been started that messages might really be sent on wires from one place to another, it began to grow in many minds at once, and almost at the same time a German, an Englishman, and an American, began to invent a system of telegraphing by electricity. The American, to whom we owe our telegraph, was Samuel Morse of Massachusetts. His father was the Rev. Jedediah Morse, a clergyman, who had made the first geography ever published in America. Your great grandfathers and grandmothers, no doubt, studied Morse's Geography when they went to school. Samuel Morse made up his mind to be an artist, and went over to England early in life to study painting with two great American painters, Washington Allston and Benjamin West. You remember, Robert Fulton was an artist, too, and that he also went to England and studied with West. There is an idea quite prevalent that painters and other artists are not very practical, but for all that the two men who introduced steamboats and telegraphing into America, and made them go, were artists by profession. While studying and practicing his profession, Mr. Morse went several times across the Atlantic Ocean. On one of these journeys, in the year 1832, he was talking with a fellow-passenger about discoveries in electricity, and in the course of the talk the idea of the telegraph, just as he afterwards carried it out, came into his head. He went to his cabin and made drawings to express his idea, and from that time forward devoted himself to perfecting his design. In the mean time William Cooke and William Wheatstone in England, and Professor Steinheil in Germany, were also busily engaged in a similar enterprise. Wheatstone's telegraph was done first, and was used in England in 1837. Morse could not get the help which he asked from Congress till 1843. Then they gave him $30,000 to aid him in his work, and in 1844 a wire was laid from Washington to Baltimore and the first message ever sent in the United States passed between those two cities. Professor Steinheil was not so fortunate as his rivals. He, too, produced a telegraphing apparatus so nearly similar to Morse's that only a very slight difference marked Morse's superiority. When Morse went to Europe to get his invention used there, the three systems of Wheatstone, Steinheil, and Morse were exhibited. Steinheil closely examined Morse's in the respect in which it differed from his own, and finally, with touching generosity, declared that the American invention was the best, and recommended it to the committee who were examining it. A man who could so generously support the interests of science, when to do so cost him the work of a life-time, and made his own invention useless, must be a noble character, and I like to record here the name of Professor Steinheil of Munich. Wheatstone strongly contended for the superiority of his method, and it has kept the supremacy in England. Morse's telegraph was accepted by nearly all the European nations, and he was loaded with honors in Europe and America. Such is briefly the history of the electric telegraph, one of the great inventions of the world. It makes the year 1844 one of the most notable in our country's history. Samuel F. B. Morse. A dispute which greatly troubled political parties in John Tyler's time, was about the annexation of Texas; whether we should let the independent State of Texas become one of the United States. We have not before heard of this new country of Texas, and I must begin a new chapter to tell you about it. CHAPTER XIX. BRIEF HISTORY OF MEXICO. Spanish Conquest of Mexico - Inhabitants of Mexico.-Americans in Texas. - ton. Sam Hous Do you remember Hernando Cortez? He was the Spanish warrior who, with a handful of soldiers, entered the territory of Mexico in North America, penetrated to its great inland capital, took the emperor Montezuma prisoner in his very palace, and subjected the country to the power of Spain. For years the gold and silver of Mexico went to enrich the coffers of Spain, and its mines seemed to offer boundless riches which could never be exhausted. All the dreams of Columbus, of the rich lands which he hoped to find in the East, were fulfilled in the western country of Mexico. Ever since the conquest of Cortez, Mexico had belonged to Spain. This not only included the present domain of Mexico, but Texas, California, and New Mexico, all three now States and Territories of the United States. I am going to tell you how these three large portions of Mexico came to be joined to our territory. Poor Spain had not been fortunate in her American possessions. First she was obliged to cede Louisiana to France, and we bought that Territory of the latter country. Then she was obliged to yield Florida to the United States, in order to settle a dispute about boundaries. Thus her possessions began to dwindle away. The inhabitants of Mexico had been a mixed population from the time of Cortez. First, there were the Spanish settlers, who held the power and the government offices, and were haughty, overbearing, and often cruel to their inferiors; then there were the native Mexicans, or Indians, who were a race easily subdued, and who had suffered great oppression under Spanish rule; lastly there were a mixed race, which had sprung from the intermarriage of the Spanish and Indian races. These made up the inhabitants of Mexico. After the United States became an independent nation, there was a strong party in Mexico, disliking the Spanish rule, who would have been very glad to follow the example of the United States in making herself an independent nation. Affairs were tolerably quiet there, however, till 1810, when the Mexicans revolted and tried to throw off the power of Spain. There was a good deal of hot fighting for several years. Sometimes the Spanish would think the rebellion was subdued, and everything settled, when all at once the Mexicans would be up in arms again, and the Spanish rulers deposed and sent to prison. At length, in 1824, Mexico finally declared herself a republic, free of Spain; drew up a constitution, made a federal union of nineteen states and four territories, and elected her president and vice-president for four years, just like the United States. Thus we had a republican neighbor next door, and the power of Spain was broken in America. There were a great many American settlers living in a part of Mexico called Texas, which joined the United States, and many of them helped the Mexicans in their rebellion against Spain. When Mexico became a republic, many Americans bought land-grants, and went to Texas to settle. It was such a great broad country to raise cattle upon, that hundreds of colonists went there with herds of cows. and horses; soon innumerable cattle with a letter branded in their hides to show the name of their owner, roamed over the boundless, unfenced prairies. A great many adventurers also came to Texas, men who had broken the laws of the United States and were afraid of its justice, so that the State contained many outlawed men, some of whom made trouble among the peaceable, order loving colonists. The principal American settler, and one who had brought a large colony to Texas, was a man from New England, named Stephen Austin. If you study the map of Texas you will see that he has a county and town named for him there. The Americans were much more enterprising and thrifty than the Mexicans. Where they settled, the country soon began to look trim and neat, with comfortable houses and well kept farm-yards. The Mexicans were content to live from generation to generation in "adobe" houses, houses built of rude bricks, made of mud dried in the sun. They had little energy, and none of the Yankee shrewdness which was apt to get the better of them in all their bargains. It was quite natural that they should begin to feel jealous, and a little afraid of these pushing, enterprising Yankees. So when in 1833 the Americans held a convention, and sent Stephen Austin to the city of Mexico to ask that Texas should be admitted as a State into the Mexican Union, they kept him for months in a state of uncertainty about what answer they meant to make him. |