"Well," said Hale, "you had better attend to it and quit playing on wind instruments." Sanders's banker, too, became uneasy on one occasion and requested him to call at the bank.

"Mr.Sanders," he said, "I will be obliged if you will take that telephone stock out of the bank, and give me in its place your note for thirty thousand dollars.

I am expecting the examiner here in a few days, and I don't want to get caught with that stuff in the bank." Then, in the very midnight of this depression, poor Bell returned from England, whither he and his bride had gone on their honeymoon, and announced that he had no money; that he had failed to establish a telephone business in England; and that he must have a thousand dollars at once to pay his urgent debts.

He was thoroughly discouraged and sick.
As he lay in the Massachusetts General Hospital, he wrote a cry for help to the embattled little company that was making its desperate fight to protect his patents.

"Thousands of telephones are now in operation in all parts of the country," he said, "yet I have not yet received one cent from my invention.