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.

On returning home, he would look on his table for communications, or he
would ask, "Has anybody called for me to-day?" But there was never any
letter; and Mrs. Markham's gentle response always was, "No one