The inventor, his nerves stretched to the breaking point, hoped and yet feared.

He had every reason to believe that the Senate would show more broad-minded enlightenment than the House, and yet he had been told that his bill would pass the House by acclamation, while the event proved that it had barely squeezed through by a beggarly majority of six.

He heard disquieting rumors of a determination on the part of some of the House members to procure the defeat of the bill in the Senate.

Would they succeed, would the victory, almost won, be snatched from him at the last moment, or would his faith in an overruling Providence, and in his own mission as an instrument of that Providence, be justified at last?
Every day of that fateful week saw him in his place in the gallery of the Senate chamber, and all day long he sat there, listening, as we can well imagine, with growing impatience to the senatorial oratory on the merits or demerits of bills which to him were of such minor importance, however heavily freighted with the destinies of the nation they may have been.
And every night he returned to his room with the sad reflection that one more of the precious days had passed and his bill had not been reached.
And then came the last day, March 3, that day when the session of the Senate is prolonged till midnight, when the President, leaving the White House, sits in the room provided for him at the Capitol, ready to sign the bills which are passed in these last few hurried hours, if they meet with his approval, or to consign them to oblivion if they do not.
The now despairing inventor clung to his post in the gallery almost to the end, but, being assured by his senatorial friends that there was no possibility of the bill being reached, and unable to bear the final blow of hearing the gavel fall which should signalize his defeat, shrinking from the well-meant condolences of his friends, he returned almost broken-hearted to his room.
The future must have looked black indeed.

He had staked his all and lost, and he was resolved to abandon all further efforts to press his invention on an unfeeling and a thankless world.