“Will you be kind enough to give the information desired by letter to me, at this place (Canandaigua, N. Y.)?  By so doing you will confer a favor on a fond mother and many friends.”  Not a lisp had ever been heard of such a person, at least by that name.

The whole country, it was found, had now been in commotion for a month or more, owing to the ravages of the cholera and the Black Hawk war.  The cholera had first broken out, it appears, in the Upper Lakes, on board the steamers Sheldon Thompson and Henry Clay, containing troops for the war.  Its ravages on board of both were fearful.  One of the boats landed several soldiers at the island of Michilimackinack, who died there.  A boatman engaged in the fur trade took the disease and died after he had reached the Little Rapids, and another at Point aux Pins, at the foot of Lake Superior.  But the disease did not spread in that latitude.  “We have heard,” says a correspondent (25th July), “from Chicago, that the ravages of the cholera are tenfold worse than the scalping-knife of the Black Hawk and his party.  A great many soldiers died, while on their way to Chicago, on board the steamers.”

27th.  The agent of the dead-letter post-office, at Washington, transmits me a diploma of membership of the Royal Geographical Society of London, which appears to have been originally misdirected and gone astray to St. Mary’s, Georgia.  The envelope had on it the general direction of “United States, America”—­a wide place to find a man in.

Sept. 11th.  A letter, of this date, from the head of the Department, at Washington, leaves it optional with me, under the consolidation of agencies, to choose my place of residence.  “You can make your own choice of residence between the Sault and Mackinack, and arrange your subordinate offices as you think proper.”

I determined to remove the seat of the agency to Mackinack next spring, and to make this my last winter at the Sault.  I have now been ten years a resident of this place.

The most serious inroad upon my circle of friends, made by death during my absence, was the sudden death, at Detroit, of the eldest daughter of the Secretary of War.  Miss Elizabeth Selden Cass was a young lady of bright mental qualities, and easy, cultivated manners and deportment, and her sudden removal, though prepared by her moral experience for the change, must leave a blank in social circles which will be long felt and deplored.

Her father writes, upon this irreparable loss:  “A breach has been made in our domestic circle which can never be repaired.  I can yet hardly realize the change.  It has almost prostrated me, and I should abandon office without hesitation were it not that a change of climate seems indispensable to Mrs. C., and I trust she will avoid in Washington those severe attacks to which she has been subject for the last five winters.”