A few months will decide....

You have before you the fate of an inventor, and, take as much pains as you will to secure to yourself your valuable invention, make up your mind from my experience now, in addition to others, that you will be robbed of it and abused into the bargain.

This is the lot of a successful inventor or discoverer, and no precaution, I believe, will save him from it.

He will meet with a mixed estimate; the enlightened, the liberal, the good, will applaud him and respect him; the sordid, the unprincipled will hate him and detract from his reputation to compass their own contemptible and selfish ends." While events in the business world were rapidly converging towards the great lawsuits which should either confirm the inventor's rights to the offspring of his brain, or deprive him of all the benefits to which he was justly and morally entitled, he continued to find solace from all his cares and anxieties in his new home, with his children and friends around him.

He touches on the lights and shadows in a letter to his brother, who was still in England, dated New York, April 19, 1848:-- "I snatch a moment by the Washington, which goes to-morrow, to redeem my character in not having written of late so often as I could wish.