“I perceive the Magnetic Telegraph Company meet in Washington on Thursday the 11th.  Please inform me by telegraph the amount of dividend they declare and the time payable.  This is the only source on which I can calculate for the means of subsistence from day to day with any degree of certainty.

“It is a singular reflection that occurs frequently to my mind that out of 40,000 miles of telegraph, all of which should pay me something, only 225 miles is all that I can depend upon with certainty; and the case is a little aggravated when I think that throughout all Europe, which is now meshed with telegraph wires from the southern point of Corsica to St. Petersburg, on which my telegraph is universally used, not a mile contributes to my support or has paid me a farthing.

“Well, it is all well.  I am not in absolute want, for I have some credit, and painful as is the state of debt to me from the apprehension that creditors may suffer from my delay in paying them, yet I hope on.”

Mr. Kendall was not so sensitive on the subject of debt as was Morse, and he was also much more optimistic and often rebuked his friend for his gloomy anticipations, assuring him that the clouds were not nearly so dark as they appeared.

Always imbued with a spirit of lofty patriotism, Morse never failed, even in the midst of overwhelming cares, to give voice to warnings which he considered necessary.  Replying to an invitation to be present at a public dinner he writes:—­

GENTLEMEN,—­I have received your polite invitation to join with you in the celebration of the birthday of Washington.  Although unable to be present in person, I shall still be with you in heart.

Every year, indeed every day, is demonstrating the necessity of our being wide awake to the insidious sapping of our institutions by foreign emissaries in the guise of friends, who, taking advantage of the very liberality and unparalleled national generosity which we have extended to them, are undermining the foundations of our political fabric, substituting (as far as they are able to effect their purpose) on the one hand a dark, cold and heartless atheism, or, on the other, a disgusting, puerile, degrading superstition in place of the God of our fathers and the glorious elevating religion of love preached by his Son.

The American mind, I trust, is now in earnest waking up, and no one more rejoices at the signs of the times than myself.  Twenty years ago I hoped to have seen it awake, but, alas! it proved to be but a spasmodic yawn preparatory to another nap.  If it shall now have waked in earnest, and with renewed strength shall gird itself to the battle which is assuredly before it, I shall feel not a little in the spirit of good old Simeon—­ “Now let thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”

Go forward, my friends, in your patriotic work, and may God bless you in your labors with eminent success.