Oct. 5th.  Washington Irving responds, in the kindest terms, to my letter transmitting some manuscript materials relative to the Indian history.

12th.  Mr. Green, of Boston, wrote me on the 8th instant unfavorably to the stability of the Christian character of my friend Otwin, whom I had recommended to the Board for employment in the missionary field in Lake Superior, in connection with the missionary family at La Pointe.  Mr. S. Hall, the head of that Mission, writes (Oct. 12th):  “I am glad that the providence of God directed (him) this way, and trust his coming into this region will be for the interest of Zion’s Kingdom here.  He appears to be a man of faith and prayer.  I trust he will be the means of stirring up to more diligence in the service of our Master.”  What greater aid could be given to a lone far off Indian mission, than “a man of faith and prayer.”  When an observer in the vast panorama of the West and North has seen a poor missionary and his family, living five-hundred miles from the nearest verge of civilization, solitary and desolate, surrounded with heathen red men, and worse than heathen white men, with none out of his little circle to honor God or appreciate his word, it is presumable to him that any reinforcement of help must be hailed as cold water to a parched tongue.  Not that there is any supposed difference of opinion on the main question, between the Head and the forest hands, so to say, of the Board, but it is difficult, at Boston, to appreciate the disheartening circumstances surrounding the missionary in the field.  And any youthful instability, or eccentricity of means in the way of advancing the Gospel, should be forgiven, for the cause, after years of experience, and not written against “a man of faith and prayer,” as it appears to have been by the pastor of Middleburgh, as with a pen of iron.

14th.  Pendonwa, son of Wahazo, a brother of the Ottawa chief, Wing, reports himself as electing to become “an American,” and says he had so declared himself to Col.  Boyd, the former Indian agent.

27th.  Dr. C.R.  Gilman, of New York, having, with Major M. Hoffman, of Wall Street, paid me a visit and made a picturesque “trip to the Pictured Rocks of Lake Superior,” writes me after his safe return to the city, piquing himself on that adventure, after having exchanged congratulations with his less enterprising cityloving friends.  It was certainly an event to be booked, that two civilians so soldered down to the habits of city life in different lines as the Doctor and the Major, should have extended their summer excursion as far as Michilimackinack.  But it was a farther evidence of enterprise, and the love of the picturesque, that they should have taken an Indian canoe, and a crew of engagees, at that point, and ventured to visit the Pictured Rocks in Lake Superior.  “Life on the Lakes” (the title of Dr. G.’s book) was certainly a widely different affair to “Life in New York.”