"I shall be most delighted, Sir William," answered Bell. "I will make the necessary arrangements and telegraph you at once."
After more congratulations for the young inventor, the group dispersed, the judges going away to the dinner they had for a while forgotten. But during the meal and through the evening they talked of little but the new invention; and Arthur distinctly remembers to this day the enthusiastic remark of Sir William Thomson: "What yesterday I should have declared impossible I have to-day seen realized. The speaking telegraph is the most wonderful thing I have seen in America."
When Arthur went back to his home in one of the country towns of Massachusetts, he had many things to tell his family and his friends. To him the Exposition had been a veritable fairy land. But the most wonderful genie there was Electricity, and his most remarkable work was the speaking telegraph.
"And you could really hear through that wire?" questioned more than one incredulous person.
"I really could, and as plainly as I hear you," insisted Arthur.
"Sho, now!" remonstrated a farmer neighbor, "you only thought you could."
"Well, maybe," commented another, cautiously, "but of course there was a hole in the wire that you didn't see."
Arthur's own family were more thoughtful and intelligent people.
"I knew," said Grandfather, "that the marvels of electricity were not all understood. When I was a young man, the telegraph was the greatest wonder the world owned. But using that was somehow like talking at arm's length; the telephone brings your friend almost beside you."
"To me," said Arthur's mother, "the telephone, in comparison with the telegraph, seems like a highly finished oil painting. The old invention is like a page of black and white print."
"Why, I have seen Mr. Bell," remembered Arthur's older sister, who was studying to be a teacher, after she had heard the story. "He came to the normal school last year to explain his system of teaching deaf mutes to speak."
The Burtons heard no more of the telephone for six months or more; but the next winter, when Herbert, the older brother, came home from Tufts College to spend a week end, he exclaimed:
"Well, Arthur, I've talked through a telephone, too!"