eighteen months to the execution of a large painting of the House of
Representatives in the Capitol at Washington; but its exhibition proved
a loss, and in helping his brothers to pay his father's debts the
remains of his little fortune were swept away. He stood next to Allston
as an American historical painter, but all his productions in that line
proved a disappointment. The public would not buy them. On the other
hand, he received an order from the Corporation of New York for a
portrait of General Lafayette, the hero of the hour.

While engaged on this work he lost his wife in February, 1825, and
then his parents. In 1829 he visited Europe, and spent his time among
the artists and art galleries of England, France, and Italy. In Paris he
undertook a picture of the interior of the Louvre, showing some of the
masterpieces in miniature, but it seems that nobody purchased it. He
expected to be chosen to illustrate one of the vacant panels in the
Rotunda of the Capitol at Washington; but in this too he was mistaken.
However, some fellow-artists in America, thinking he had deserved the
honour, collected a sum of money to assist him in painting the
composition he had fixed upon: 'The Signing of the First Compact on
Board the Mayflower.'

In a far from hopeful mood after his three years' residence abroad he
embarked on the packet Sully, Captain Pell, and sailed from Havre for
New York on October 1, 1832. Among the passengers was Dr. Charles T.
Jackson, of Boston, who had attended some lectures on electricity in
Paris, and carried an electro-magnet in his trunk. One day while Morse
and Dr. Jackson, with a few more, sat round the luncheon table in the
cabin, he began to talk of the experiments he had witnessed. Some one
asked if the speed of the electricity was lessened by its passage
through a long wire, and Dr. Jackson, referring to a trial of Faraday,