as detailed by this good and sincere missionary in his retirement at Bethlehem.  He was appealed to as an oracle.  This I found by an acquaintance which I formed, in 1810, with the late amiable Dr. Wistar, while rusticating at Bristol, on the banks of the Delaware.  The confused letters which the missionary wrote many years later, were mainly due to Dr. Wistar’s philosophical interest in the subject.  They were rewritten and thoroughly revised and systematized by the learned Mr. Duponceau, in 1816, and thus the philological system laid, which was published by the Penn.  Hist.  Soc. in 1819.  During the six years that has elapsed, nobody has had the facts to examine the system.  It has been now done, and I shall be widely mistaken if this does not prove a new era in our Indian philology.

Whatever the review does on this head, however, and admitting that it pushes some positions to an ultra point, it will blow the impostor Hunter sky high.  His book is an utter fabrication, in which there is scarcely a grain of truth hid in a bushel of chaff.

Nov. 4th.  Difficulties have arisen, at this remote post, between the citizens and the military, the latter of whom have shown a disposition to feel power and forget right, by excluding, except with onerous humiliations, some citizens from free access to the post-office.  In a letter of this date, the Postmaster-General (Mr. McLean) declines to order the office to be kept out of the fort, and thus, in effect, decides against the citizens.  How very unimportant a citizen is 1000 miles from the seat of government!  The national aegis is not big enough to reach so far.  The bed is too long for the covering.  A man cannot wrap himself in it.  It is to be hoped that the Postmaster-General will live long enough to find out that he has been deceived in this matter.

29th.  Mr. Conant, of New York, writes:  “I hope you will not fail to prosecute your Indian inquiries this winter, getting out of them all the stories and all the Indian you can.  I conclude you hear an echo now and then from the big world, notwithstanding your seclusion.  The Creek Delegation is at Washington, unfriendly to the late treaty, and I expect some changes not a little interesting to the aboriginal cause.  Mr. Adams looks at his ‘red children’ with a friendly eye, and, I trust, ’the men of his house,’ as the Indian orator called Congress, will prove themselves so.  I have been charmed with the quietude and coolness manifested in Congress in reference to the Georgia business.”

And with these last words from the civilized world, we are prepared to plunge into another winter, with all its dreary accompaniments of ice and snow and tempests, and with the consoling reflection that when our poor and long-looked-for monthly express arrives, we can get our letters and papers from the office after duly performing our genuflections to a petty military chief, with the obsequiousness of a Hindoo to the image of Juggernaut.