Louis and New Orleans
in which he had not stood on the bottom under his diving-bell.

With the same devotion to his parents as when he peddled the apples in
the street, Eads now bought them a farm in Iowa, and provided in every
way he could for their comfort. But beyond the ordinary desire of
making a fortune for them, for himself, and for a new interest that was
coming into his life, it does not appear that there were in his mind
any unusual ambitions, any of the dreams of genius. As yet he was only
a hard-working, earnest young man, extraordinarily clever to be sure,
but founding on that cleverness no visions of great renown in the
future. Perhaps this was because he had enough to dream of in the
present, enough hopes of purely domestic happiness to look towards. For
he had fallen in love with a Miss Martha Dillon, a young lady of about
his own age, daughter of a rich man in Saint Louis. The father
disapproved of the match, not only because he thought the suitor too
young, too poor, too unknown, but because he wished to keep his
daughter with him, and for other less reasonable causes.

The letters between the engaged couple show Eads at twenty-five as a
keen, experienced, and yet an unsophisticated young man; generous,
proud, brave, and courteous; a lover of Nature, of poetry, of people,
and of good books; an inveterate early riser; reverend in religion, and
yet, while nominally a Catholic, really a free-thinker; sentimental in
his feelings almost as if he had lived a century sooner, and at the
same time controlling his true and deep emotions, and showing his
strong love only to those he loved.

At last Eads and Miss Dillon were married, he being over twenty-five at
the time, she nearly twenty-four. Eads then sold out his wrecking
business and left the river. He probably made this change because he
hoped thereby not only to be more with his wife, but also to support
her in the comfort she had been used to, and to show her father that he
could do so. The new enterprise, into which at least one of his old
partners entered with him, and into which he put all his money, was the
manufacture of glass; and they built the first glass factory west of
the Ohio River. He had to go to Pittsburg--then a long journey by boat,
stage, and rail--to get trained workmen and to learn the process
himself. Almost all of the necessary ingredients and apparatus had to
be sent for to Pittsburg, to Cleveland, or to New York; and they were
o