25th.  As commerce increases, and stretches out her Briarean hands into the stormy roads and bays of these heretofore uninhabited lakes, losses from wrecks annually redouble.  And the want of light-houses, buoys, and harbors is more strongly shown.  James Abbott, a licensed trader, was cast ashore by the tempests of Lake Superior, at La Pointe, and, being unable to proceed to his designated post, was obliged to winter there.  He gave out his credits, and spread his men, therefore, in another man’s district.  The agent at Mackinack (E.  Stuart) writes, complaining of, and requesting me to interpose in the matter, so as “to confine his trade to such limits as may be equitable to all.”  It would be impossible to foresee such accidents, and appears almost equally so to correct the irregularities, now that they are done.  The difficulty seems rather to have been the employment of a clerk, whose action the Company could not fully control.

29th.  Mr. B. E. Stickney, of Vistula (now Toledo), writes:  “A few days ago I received from the author, with which I was much pleased, ’an Address before the Chippewa County Temperance Society on the Influence of Ardent Spirits on the Condition of the North American Indians.’  We conceived it to be the most fortunate effort of your pen upon the greatest subject.  While we have so much reason to approve, we hope you will permit us to be frank.  We conceive that, although you have been more cautious than is common, in touching sectarianism, yet, if you had not named, or made any kind of allusion to any religious sect, Christian, Jew, Pagan, or Mohammedan, you would have produced more effect.  There are many individuals who neither touch, taste, nor handle this most dangerous of all poisons, who yet refuse to join in the general effort to destroy, prevent the use, or furnish an antidote, because they conceive that the sectarian poison is not an inferior evil, unless it may, perhaps, be so to the use of alcohol.”

The true, but concealed, objection of this class of non-concurrents in the cause is not, it is apprehended to “sectarianism,” per se, or in any other sense than that it is an evidence of practical Christianity—­of morals and axioms based on the teachings of the great Founder of the system—­of a belief in a moral accountability to give all influence possessed to advance the adoption of its maxims among men—­in fine, of a living, constant, undying faith, not only in the truth of these maxims, but in the divinity of the sublime UTTERER of them.

Dec. 10th.  Dr. Houghton, my companion in two expeditions into the Indian country, writes from Detroit:  “You will undoubtedly be a little surprised to learn that I am now in Detroit, but probably not more than I am in being here.  My passage through Lake Huron was tedious beyond endurance; and so long was I detained in consequence of it, that it became useless for me to proceed to New York.  Under these circumstances, after having visited Fredonia, I determined to engage in the practice of my profession, in this place, at least until spring.  It is only these three days since I arrived here and I am not yet completely settled, but probably will be in a few days.”