'
Soon after his return his brothers gave him a room on the fifth floor
of a house at the corner of Nassau and Beekman Streets, New York. For a
long time it was his studio and kitchen, his laboratory and bedroom.
With his livelihood to earn by his brush, and his invention to work out,
Morse was now fully occupied. His diet was simple; he denied himself the
pleasures of society, and employed his leisure in making models of his
types. The studio was an image of his mind at this epoch. Rejected
pictures looked down upon his clumsy apparatus, type-moulds lay among
plaster-casts, the paint-pot jostled the galvanic battery, and the easel
shared his attention with the lathe. By degrees the telegraph allured
him from the canvas, and he only painted enough to keep the wolf from
the door. His national picture, 'The Signing of the First Compact on
Board the Mayflower,' was never finished, and the 300 dollars which had
been subscribed for it were finally returned with interest.
For Morse by nature was proud and independent, with a sensitive
horror of incurring debt. He would rather endure privation than solicit
help or lie under a humiliating obligation. His mother seems to have
been animated with a like spirit, for the Hon.
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