occasion and requested him to call at the
bank. "Mr. Sanders," he said, "I will be obliged if you will take that
telephone stock out of the bank, and give me in its place your note for
thirty thousand dollars. I am expecting the examiner here in a few days,
and I don't want to get caught with that stuff in the bank."

Then, in the very midnight of this depression, poor Bell returned from
England, whither he and his bride had gone on their honeymoon, and
announced that he had no money; that he had failed to establish a
telephone business in England; and that he must have a thousand dollars
at once to pay his urgent debts. He was thoroughly discouraged and sick.
As he lay in the Massachusetts General Hospital, he wrote a cry for help
to the embattled little company that was making its desperate fight to
protect his patents. "Thousands of telephones are now in operation in
all parts of the country," he said, "yet I have not yet received one
cent from my invention. On the contrary, I am largely out of pocket
by my researches, as the mere value of the profession that I have
sacrificed during my three years' work, amounts to twelve thousand
dollars."

Fortunately, there came, in almost the same mail with Bell's letter,
another letter from a young Bostonian named Francis Blake, with the good
news that he had invented a transmitter as satisfactory as Edison's, and
that he would prefer to sell it for stock instead of cash. If ever a man
came as an angel of light, that man was Francis Blake. The possession of
his transmitter instantly put the Bell Company on an even footing with
the Western Union, in the matter of apparatus. It encouraged the few
capitalists who had invested money, and it stirred others to come
forward. The general business situation had by this time become
more settled, and in four months the company had twenty-two thousand
telephones in use, and had reorganized into the National Bell Telephone
Company, with $850, 000 capital and with Colonel Forbes as its first
President. Forbes now picked up the load that had been carried so long
by Sanders. As the son of an East India merchant and the son-in-law of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was a Bostonian of the Brahmin caste. He was
a big, four-square man who was both popular and efficient; and his
leadership at this crisis was of immense value.

This reorganization put the telephone business into the hands of
competent business men at every point. It brought the heroic and