ed by a curious set
of anecdotes,--never yet put in print, I think,--of that critical
despatch which in one night announced General Taylor's death to this
whole land. Most of the readers of these lines probably read that
despatch in the morning's paper. The compositors and editors had read
it. To them it was a despatch to the eye. But half the operators at the
stations _heard_ it ticked out, by the register stroke, and knew it
before they wrote it down for the press. To them it was a despatch to
the ear. My good friend Langenzunge had not that resource. He had just
been promised, by the General himself (under whom he served at Palo
Alto), the office of Superintendent of the Rocky Mountain Lines. He was
returning from Washington over the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, on a
freight-train, when he heard of the President's danger. Langenzunge
loved Old Rough and Ready,--and he felt badly about his own office, too.
But his extempore train chose to stop at a forsaken shanty-village on
the Potomac, for four mortal hours, at midnight. What does he do, but
walk down the line into the darkness, climb a telegraph-post, cut a
wire, and applied the two ends to his tongue, to _taste_, at the fatal
moment, the words, "Died at half past ten." Poor Langenzunge! he hardly
had nerve to solder the wire again. Cogs told me that they had just
fitted up the Naguadavick stations with Bain's chemical revolving disk.
This disk is charged with a salt of potash, which, when the electric
spark passes through it, is changed to Prussian blue. Your despatch is
noiselessly written in dark blue dots and lines. Just as the disk
started on that fatal despatch, and Cogs bent over it to read, his
spirit-lamp blew up,--as the dear things will. They were beside
themselves in the lonely, dark office; but, while the men were fumbling
for matches, which would not go, Cogs's sister, Nydia, a sweet blind
girl, who had learned Bain's alphabet from Dr. Howe at South Boston,
bent over the chemical paper, and _smelt_ out the prussiate of potash,
as it formed itself in lines and dots to tell the sad story. Almost
anybody used to reading the blind books can read the embossed Morse
messages with the finger,--and so this message was read at all the
midnight way-stations where no night-work is expected, and where the
companies do not supply fluid or oil. Within my narrow circle of
acquaintance, therefore, there were these simultaneous instances, where
the same message was see