“A man’s passions are given him for good, and not evil.  They are not to be destroyed, but controlled.  If they get the mastery, they destroy the man; but kept in their place, they are sources of power and happiness.”

And he used this illustration, which, though the same thing has been said by others, remains, nevertheless, fresh as truth itself:—­

“The passions are the winds that fill our sails; but the helmsman must be faithful, if we would avoid shipwreck, and reach the happy port at last.”

Salmon had remembered well these words of his uncle, and the night spent with him at the Woodstock inn.  Hearing of his arrival in Washington, he had called on him at his boarding-house.  The Senator received him kindly, listened to his plans, approved them, and helped him to procure the references named in the advertisement.

Day after day the advertisement appeared; and day after day Salmon waited for pupils.  But his room, “three doors west of Brown’s Hotel,” remained unvisited.  Sometimes, at first, when there came a knock at Mrs. Markham’s door, his heart gave a bound of expectation; but it was never a knock for him.

So went out the old year, drearily enough for Salmon.  He had made the acquaintance of several people; but friends he had none.  There was nobody to whom he could open his heart,—­for he was not one of those persons “of so loose soul” that they hasten to pour out their troubles and appeal for sympathy to the first chance-comer.  In the mean time the advertisement was to be paid for, barren of benefit though it had been to him.  There was also his board-bill to be settled at the end of each week; and Salmon saw his slender purse grow lank and lanker than ever, with no means within his reach of replenishing it.

The new year came; but it brought no brightening skies to him.  Lonely enough those days were!  When tired of waiting in his room, he would go out and walk,—­always alone.  He strolled up and down the Potomac, and sometimes crossed over to the Virginia shore, and climbed the brown, wooded banks there, and listened to the clamor of the crows in the leafless oak-trees.  There was something in their wild cawing, in the desolateness of the fields, in the rush of the cold river, that suited his mood.  It was winter in his spirit too, just then.

Sometimes he visited the halls of Congress, and saw the great legislators of those days.  There was something here that fed his heart.  Wintry as his prospects were, the sun still shone overhead; his courage never failed him; he never gave way to weak repining; and when he entered those halls,—­when he saw the deep fire in the eyes of Webster, and heard the superb thunder of his voice,—­when he listened to the witty and terrible invectives of Randolph, that “meteor of Congress,” as Benton calls him, and watched the electric effect of the “long and skinny forefinger” pointed and shaken,—­when charmed by this speaker, or convinced by that, or roused to indignation by another,—­there was kindled a sense of power within his own breast, a fire prophetic of his future.