n for the day, and, after the gallery closes at
four, dinner and exercise are necessary, so that I have no time for
anything else.

"The cholera is raging here, and I can compare the state of mind in each
man of us only to that of soldiers in the heat of battle; all the usual
securities of life seem to be gone. Apprehension and anxiety make the
stoutest hearts quail. Any one feels, when he lays himself down at night,
that he will in all probability be attacked before daybreak; for the
disease is a pestilence that walketh in darkness, and seizes the greatest
number of its victims at the most helpless hour of the night. Fifteen
hundred were seized in a day, and fifteen thousand at least have already
perished, although the official accounts will not give so many.

"_May 14._ My picture makes progress and I am sanguine of success if
nothing interferes to prevent its completion. I shall take no more
commissions here and shall only complete my large picture and a few
unfinished works.

"General Lafayette told me a few weeks ago, when I was returning with him
in his carriage, that the financial condition of the United States was a
subject of great importance, and he wished that I would write you and
others, who were known as statistical men, and get your views on the
subject. There never was a better time for demonstrating the principles
of our free institutions by showing a result favorable to our country."

Among the men of note whom Morse met while he was in Paris was Baron
Alexander von Humboldt, the famous traveller and naturalist, who was much
attracted towards the artist, and often went to the Louvre to watch him
while he was at work, or to wander through the galleries with him, deep
in conversation. He was afterwards one of the first to congratulate Morse
on the successful exhibition of his telegraph before the French Academy
of Science.

As we have already seen, Morse was intensely patriotic. He followed with
keen interest the developments in our national progress as they unrolled
themselves before his eyes, and when the occasion offered he took active
part in furthering what he considered the right and in vigorously
denouncing the wrong. He was never blind to our national or party
failings, but held the mirror up before his countrymen's eyes with steady
hand, and yet he was prouder of being an American than of anything else,
and, as I have had occasion to remark before, his ruling passion was an
intense desire t