1835. Jan. 10th. The year opened with some bright moral gleams.  The members of the church had, early in the autumn, felt the necessity of a close union.  Left by their esteemed pastor, who had been their “guide, philosopher, and friend” for twelve years, and by some of its leading members, they rested with more directness and simplicity of faith on God.  They ordained a fast.  Evening and lecture meetings were observed to be full of eager listeners.  A marked attention was paid on the Sabbath when Mr. J.D.  Stevens, who had come into the harbor late in the fall, bound westward, agreed to pass the winter and occupied Mr. Ferry’s empty desk.  The Sabbath schools in the village and at the mission were observed to be well attended.  Indeed, it was not long in being noticed that we were in the midst of a quiet and deeply-spread revival.  Never, it would seem, was there a truer exemplification of the maxim that “the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong,” for we had supposed ourselves to be shorn of all strength by the loss of our pastor, by the failure of help from the Home Missionary Society, and by the withdrawal from the island of some of our most efficient members.  This feeling of weakness and desertion was, in fact, the secret of our strength, which laid in the church’s humility.  Ere we were aware of it, a spirit of profound seriousness stole over the community like a soft and gentle wind.

28th.  Maj.  Whiting writes, from Detroit:  “There is nothing new in the political world, excepting that Michigan has no governor yet, and that the council has authorized a convention to form a State Government next April.  Some think the step premature; others that it is all a matter of course.  The cold has been excessive on the Atlantic seaboard—­down to about 40 deg. below zero in New England, and even 22 deg. below at Washington.  Here we have had it hardly down to 0.”

Feb. 3d.  Mr. Robert Stuart writes, from Brooklyn, in relation to the revival in a portion of the inhabitants of this island, among whom he has so long lived, in terms of Christian sympathy.  Mackinack is a point where, to amass “silver and gold,” has been the great struggle of men from the earliest days of our history.  Few places on the continent have been so celebrated a locality, for so long a period, of wild and unlicensed enjoyment, for both burgeois and voyageur engaged in the perilous and adventuresome business of the fur trade.  Those who speak of its history during the last half of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, depict the periods of the annual return of the traders from their wintering stations in the great panorama of the wilderness, east, west, north, and south, as a perfect carnival, in which eating and drinking and wild carousals prevailed.  The earnings of a year were often spent in a week or a day.  As to practical morality, it was regarded by the higher order of “merchant-voyageurs”