passing of the act of Congress appropriating thirty thousand dollars
toward carrying out your Electro-Magnetic Telegraph. I congratulate you
with all my heart. Shakespeare says: 'There is a tide in the affairs of
men that, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.' You are now fairly
launched on what I hope will prove to you another Pactolus. _I pede
fausto!_

"This has been but a melancholy year to me. I have been ill with one
complaint or another nearly the whole time; the last disorder the
erysipelas, but this has now nearly disappeared. I hope this letter will
meet you as well in health as I take it you are now in spirits."

Morse lost no time in replying:--

"I thank you, my dear sir, for your congratulations in regard to my
telegraphic enterprise. I hope I shall not disappoint the expectations of
my friends. I shall exert all my energies to show a complete and
satisfactory result. When I last wrote you from Washington, I wrote under
the apprehension that my bill would not be acted upon, and consequently I
wrote in very low spirits.

"'What has become of painting?' I think I hear you ask. Ah, my dear sir,
when I have diligently and perseveringly wooed the coquettish jade for
twenty years, and she then jilts me, what can I do? But I do her
injustice, she is not to blame, but her guardian for the time being. I
shall not give her up yet in despair, but pursue her even with lightning,
and so overtake her at last.

"I am now absorbed in my arrangements for fulfilling my designs with the
Telegraph in accordance with the act of Congress. I know not that I shall