20th.  Seclusion from the World realized.—­We are now shut out from the world.  The season of navigation has closed, the last vessel has departed.  Philosophers may write, and poets may sing of the charms of solitude, but when the experiment comes to be tried, on a practical scale, such as we are now, one and all, about to realize, theories and fancies sink wonderfully in the scale.  For some weeks past, everything with the power of motion or locomotion has been exerting itself to quit the place and the region, and hie to more kindly latitudes for the winter.  Nature has also become imperceptibly sour tempered, and shows her teeth in ice and snows. Man-kind and bird-kind have concurred in the effort to go.  We have witnessed the long-drawn flight of swans, brant, and cranes, towards the south.  Singing birds have long since gone.  Ducks, all but a very few, have also silently disappeared, and have probably gone to pick up spicy roots in the Susquehannah or Altamaha.

Prescient in the changes of the season, they have been the first to go.  Men, who can endure greater changes and vicissitudes than all the animal creation put together, have lingered longer; but at last one after another has left Pa-wa-teeg, till all who can go have gone.  Col.  Brady did not leave his command till after the snow fell, and he saw them tolerably “cantoned.”  The last vessel for the season has departed—­the last mail has been sent.  Our population has been thinned off by the departure of every temporary dweller, and lingering trader, and belated visitor, till no one is left but the doomed and fated number whose duty is here, who came here to abide the winter in all its regions, and who cannot, on any fair principle or excuse, get away.  They, and they alone, are left to winter here.  Of this number I am a resigned and willing unit, and I have endeavored to prepare for the intellectual exigencies of it, by a systematic study and analysis of the Indian language, customs, and history, and character.  My teachers and appliances are the best.  I have furnished myself with vocabularies and hand-books, collected and written down, during the season.  I have the post library in my room, in addition to my own, with a free access to that of “mine host” of the Emerald Isle, Mr. Johnston, to while away the time.  My huge Montreal stove will take long billets of wood, which, to use the phraseology of Burns, “would mend a mill.”  The society of the officers and their families of the garrison is at hand.  The amusements of a winter, in this latitude, are said to be rather novel, with their dog trains and creole sleighs.  There are some noble fellows of the old “North West” order in the vicinity.  There are thus the elements, at least, of study, society, and amusement.  Whatever else betide, I have good health, and good spirits, and bright hopes, and I feel very much in the humor of enjoying the wildest kind of tempests which Providence may send to howl around my dwelling.