Since then he had done many other things.

The one city of Buenos Ayres had paid him more, merely for giving it a system of trolleys and electric lights, than the United States had paid him for putting the telephone on a business basis.

He was now rich and retired, free to enjoy his play-work of the farm and to forget the troubles of the city and the telephone.
But, as he stood among his barn-builders, there arrived from Boston and New York a delegation of telephone directors.

Most of them belonged to the "Old Guard" of telephony.

They had fought under Vail in the pioneer days; and now they had come to ask him to return to the telephone business, after twenty years of absence.