11th.  Harbor and channel quite clear; the weather has assumed a mildness, although the sky is overcast, and snow drifted in the roads during the morning.  Miss Jones, Mr. D. Stuart, Dr. Turner, and Mr. Johnston spent the evening with me.

12th.  Filled my ice-house with ice of a granular and indifferent quality, none other to be had.

13th.  Mild, thawing, spring-like weather.  Visits by Captain and Mrs. Barnum.

14th.  About eight o’clock this morning, a vessel from Detroit dropped anchor in the harbor, causing all hearts to be gay at the termination of our wintry exclusion from the world.  It proved to be the “Commodore Lawrence,” of Huron, Ohio, on a trip to Green Bay.  Our last vessel left the harbor on the 18th of December, making the period of our incarceration just eighty-five days, or but two and a half months.  Visited by Lieut. and Mrs. Lavenworth.

15th.  Mild and pleasant.  Plucked the seed of the mountain ash in front of the agency dwelling, and planted it on the face of the cliff behind the house.  Mr. Chapman arrived with express news from the Sault.

16th.  S. Anni-me-au-gee-zhick-ud, as the Indians term it, and a far more appropriate term it is than the unmeaning Saxon phrase of Sunday_.

17th.  Very mild and pleasant day.  The snow is rapidly disappearing under the influence of the sun.  Mackinack stands on a horse-shoe bay, on a narrow southern slope of land, having cliffs and high lands immediately back of it, some three hundred feet maximum height.  It is, therefore, exposed to the earliest influences of spring, and they develop themselves rapidly.  Mr. Hulbert arrived from the Sault in the morning, bringing letters from Rev. Mr. Clark, Mr. Audrain, my sub-agent at that point, &c.

18th.  Wind southerly.  This drives the ice from the peninsula into the harbor, it then shifts west, and drives it down the lake.  A lowering sky ends with a sprinkling of rain in the forenoon; it then clears up, and the sun appears in the afternoon.  Dr. Turner visits me at the office.  Conversation turns on my translations into the Indian, and the principles of the language.  An Indian has a term for man and for white; but, when he wishes to express the sense of white man, he employs neither.  He then compounds the term wa-bish-kiz-zi-—­that is, white person.

19th.  The weather is quite spring-like.  Prune cherry trees and currant bushes.  Transplant plum tree sprouts.  Messrs. Biddle and Drew finish preparing their vessel, and anchor her out.

20th.  The thermometer sinks to 18 deg. at eight o’clock A.M.  Snows, and is boisterous all day, the wind being north-east.

21st.  The snow, which has continued falling all night, is twelve to fourteen inches deep in the morning; being the heaviest fall of snow, at one time, all winter.  Some ice is formed.