In his twenty-fifth year he set forth from his bleak New Hampshire home to seek his fortune, and we are able to sense the spirit and temper of the youth from the jottings of his journal. At Boston he heard Edward Everett whom he thought a “youth of great promise.” At Washington he attended a White House levee, finding Dolly Madison “a noble and dignified person,” the President’s “personal appearance very inferior,” and meeting Felix Grundy and Lewis Cass. Thence he passed down the Ohio, a guest of Major Barry, and became a citizen of Kentucky. At Lexington he entered the home of Henry Clay, engaged by Mrs. Clay as a tutor for the children. In later years, when he was the mysterious power in the Jackson Administration, and Clay the leader of the Opposition, the drawing-rooms of Washington buzzed with a fantastic tale, intended to prove his depravity and ingratitude. Harriet Martineau,[339] while in the capital, heard it and incorporated it in her book. According to this story “tidings reached Mr. and Mrs. Clay one evening that a young man, solitary and poor, lay ill of a fever in a noisy hotel in the town. Mrs. Clay went down in the carriage without delay, and brought the sufferer home to her house, where she nursed him with her own hands till he recovered. Mr. Clay was struck with the talents of the young man and retained him as a tutor of his sons, heaping benefits upon him with characteristic bounty.” Unhappily for the tale, Kendall was not ill, Mr. Clay was at Geneva at the time of his employment and during the entire period of his stay in Ashland, and the “benefits heaped upon him” consisted of $300 a year with board and lodging, and the privilege of using Mr. Clay’s library. Soon after leaving the service of the Clays, we find him recording in his diary: “Rode to Lexington and visited H. Clay. I found him a very agreeable man, and was familiarly acquainted with him in half an hour.” However, his sojourn at Ashland was pleasurable and profitable. Mrs. Clay, deeply interested in him, chaffed him on his timidity, criticized the stiffness of his bows, and drove him to his room to practice before the mirror, admitted him to her social gatherings, called upon him to read his poetry to her friends, and rallied him about his love affairs. Thus the “mediocre” and vulgar “writer for pay” of the Jackson régime was once considered fit for the social circle in the home of Henry Clay.