27th.  I devoted the day and evening in transcribing words into my “Ojibwa Vocabulary.”  This is a labor requiring great caution.  The language is so concrete, that often, when I have supposed a word had been dissected and traced to its root, subsequent attention has proved it to be a compound.  Thus verbs have been inserted with pronouns, or with particles, indicating negation, or the past or future tense, when it has been supposed they had been divested of these appendages.  I am now going over the work the third time.  The simplest forms of the verb seem to be the first and third persons singular of the imperative mood.

Ennui, in situations like the present, being isolated and shut up as it were from the world, requires to be guarded against.  The surest preventive of it is employment, and diversity in employment.  It has been determined to-day to get up a periodical sheet, or jeu d’esprit newspaper, to be circulated from family to family, commencing on the first of January.  Mrs. Thompson asked me for a name.  I suggested the “Northern Light.”  It was finally determined to put this into Latin, and call it Aurora Borealis.

28th.  Visits make up a part of the winter’s amusements.  We owe this duty to society; but, like other duties, which are largely connected with enjoyment, there is a constant danger that more time be given up to it than is profitable.  Conversation is the true index of feeling.  We read wise and grave books, but are not a whit better by them, than as they introduce and fix in our minds such principles as shall shine out in conversation or acts.  Now were an ordinary social winter evening party tested by such principles, what would a candid spectator judge to have been the principal topics of reading or study?  I remember once, in my earlier years, to have passed an evening in a room where a number of my intimate friends were engaged in playing at cards.  As I did not play, I took my seat at an office-table, and hastily sketched the conversation which I afterwards read for their amusement.  But the whole was in reality a bitter satire on their language and sentiments, although it was not so designed by me, nor received by them.  I several years afterwards saw the sketch of this conversation among my papers, and was forcibly struck with this reflection.

Let me revert to some of the topics of conversation introduced in the circles where I have visited this day, or in my own room.  It is Goldsmith, I think, who says that our thoughts take their tinge from contiguous objects.  A man standing near a volcano would naturally speak of burning mountains.  A person traversing a field of snow would feel his thoughts occupied with polar scenes.  Thus are we here thrown together.  Ice, snow, winds, a high range of the thermometer, or a driving tempest, are the almost ever present topics of remark:  and these came in for a due share of the conversation to-day.  The probability of the ice in the river’s breaking up the latter part of April, and the arrival of a vessel at the post early in May!—­the dissolution of the seventeenth Congress, which must take place on the 4th of March, the character and administration of Governor Clinton (which were eulogized), were adverted to.