Several years later he established a shipbuilding plant near Boston, which grew until it employed four thousand workmen and had built half a dozen warships for the United States Navy.
As for Bell, the first cause of the telephone business, he did what a true scientific Bohemian might have been expected to do; he gave all his stock to his bride on their marriage-day and resumed his work as an instructor of deaf-mutes.

Few kings, if any, had ever given so rich a wedding present; and certainly no one in any country ever obtained and tossed aside an immense fortune as incidentally as did Bell.

When the Bell Company offered him a salary of ten thousand dollars a year to remain its chief inventor, he refused the offer cheerfully on the ground that he could not "invent to order." In 1880, the French Government gave him the Volta Prize of fifty thousand francs and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

He has had many honors since then, and many interests.

He has been for thirty years one of the most brilliant and picturesque personalities in American public life.