purchase a house. But time will, perhaps, enable me to do so, if it is
well that I should have one.... I have had some pretty threatening
obstacles, but they as yet are summer clouds which seem to be dissipating
through the smiles of our Heavenly Father. House's affair I think is
dead. I believe it has been held up by speculators to drive a better
bargain with me, thinking to scare me; but they don't find me so easily
frightened. In Virginia I had to oppose a most bigoted, narrow, illiberal
clique in a railroad company, which had the address to get a bill through
the House of Delegates giving them actually the monopoly of telegraphs,
and ventured to halloo before they were out of the woods. Mr. Kendall
went post-haste to Richmond, met the bill and its supporters before the
Committee of the Senate, and, after a sharp contest, procured its
rejection in the Senate, and the adoption, by a vote of 13 to 7, of a
substitute granting me _right of way_ and _corporate powers_, which bill,
after violent opposition in the House, was finally passed, 44 to 27. So a
mean intrigue was defeated most signally, and I came off triumphant."

"_April 27._ This you will recognize by the date is my birthday; 36 years
old. Only think, I shall never be 26 again. Don't you wish you were as
young as I am? Well, if _feelings_ determined age I should be in reality
what I have above stated, but that leaf in the family Bible, those boys
and that daughter, those nieces and nephews of younger brothers, and
especially that _grandson_, they all concur in putting twenty years more
to those 36. I cannot get them off; there they are 56!...

"There is an underhand intrigue against my telegraph interests in
Virginia, fostered by a friend turned enemy in the hope to better his own
interests, a man whom I have ever treated as a friend while I had the
governmental patronage to bestow, and gave him office in Baltimore.
Having no more of patronage to give I have no more friendship from him.