There was a perfect jam this evening at Blair’s.  What sort of a compliment is it to be one of five or six hundred people, not half of whom can be squeezed into a small house, and not one of whom can pretend to taste a morsel without the danger of having server and all jammed down his throat.

3d.  The mail hunts up everybody.  Go where you will, and particularly to the seat of government, and letters will follow you.  Whoever is in the service of government bears a part of the functions of it, though it be but an infinitesimal part.  Mr. H. Conner, the Saginaw sub-agent, in a letter of this date, reports the Saginaws at one thousand four hundred and forty-three souls, and the Swan Creek and Black River Chippewas at one hundred and ninety-eight.  One of the most singular facts in the statistics of the most of the frontier Indian tribes of the Lakes, is, in the long run, that they neither increase nor decline, but just keep up a sort of dying existence.

4th.  Dr. Thomas H. Webb, Secretary of the Rhode Island Historical Society, announces the plan of that Society in publishing a series of works illustrating, in the first place, the history and language of the Indians, and soliciting me to become a contributor of original observations.  The difficulty in all true efforts of our literary history is the want of means.  A man must devote all his leisure in researches, and then finds that there is no way in which these labors can be made to aid in supplying him the means of subsistence.  He must throw away his time, and yet buy his bread.  There is no real taste for letters in a people who will not pay for them.  It is too early in our history, perhaps, to patronize them as a general thing.  Making and inventing new ploughs will pay, but not books.

9th.  The Secretary of War confirms my leave of absence, to visit Europe, and extends it beyond the contingencies of a re-appointment, on the 4th of March next.

10th.  Attended a general and crowded party at Gen. Macomb’s, in the evening, with Mrs. Schoolcraft.  The General has always appeared to me a perfect amateur in military science, although he has distinguished himself in the field.  He is a most polished and easy man in all positions in society, and there is an air and manner by which he constantly reveals his French blood.  He has a keen perception of the ridiculous, and a nice appreciation of the mock gravity of the heroic in character, and related to me a very effective scene of this latter kind, which occurred at Mr. John Johnston’s, at St. Mary’s Falls, on the close of the late war.  He had visited that place in perhaps 1815 or 1816, as military commander of the District of Michigan, in the suite of Major-Gen. Brown.  They were guests of Mr. Johnston.  In going up the river to see Gros Cape, at the foot of Lake Superior, the American party had been fired upon by the Chippewas, who were yet hostile in feeling.  When the party