14th.  Judge Bronson, of Florida, last evening, at a party at his cousin’s (Arthur Bronson, 46 Bond Street, N. Y.), states that, as Chairman of a Committee in Congress, a few years ago, he had reported a bill for allowing the Brotherton Indians to hold their property in Wisconsin individually, and to enjoy the rights of citizenship; and that this bill passed both houses.

20th.  Went to dine with Charles Fenno Hoffman, at his lodgings in Houston Street.  Found his room garnished with curiosities of various sorts, indicative, among other things, of his interest in the Indian race.  A poet in his garret I had long heard of, but a liberal gentlemanly fellow, surrounded by all the elegances of life, I had not thought of as the domicil of the Muses.  Mr. Hoffman impressed me as being very English in his appearance and manners.  His forehead is quite Byronic in its craniological developments.  His eye and countenance are of the most commanding character.  Pity that such a handsome man, so active in everything that calls for the gun, the rod, the boat, the horse, the dog, should have been shorn of so essential a prerequisite as a leg.  His conversational powers are quite extraordinary.  I felt constantly as if I were in the presence of a lover of nature and natural things; a bon vivant perhaps, or an epicure, a Tom Moore, in some sense, whose day-dreams of heaven are mixed up with glowing images of women and wine.

27th.  I was directed from Washington to relieve the principal disbursing officer at Detroit.  Here then my hopes of visiting Europe are blown sky high for the present.  I must return to the north, and, so far as labor is concerned, “heap Pelion on Ossa.”

April 6th.  There is hardly a word in the Indian languages which does not readily yield to the power of analysis.  They call tobacco, Ussama. Ussa, means to put (anything inanimate). Ma, is a particle denoting smell.  The us, in the first syllable, is sounded very slight, and often, perhaps, nearly dropt, and the word then seems as if spelt Sa ma.  The last vowel is broad.

8th.  Left the city for Detroit.  In ascending the Hudson, with so good an interpreter at my side as Mrs. Schoolcraft, whom I have carried through a perfect course of philological training in the English, Latin, and Hebrew principles of formation, I analyzed many of the old Indian names, which, until we reached Albany, are all in a peculiar dialect of the Algonquin.

SING SING.—­This name is the local form of the name for rocks, and conveys the idea of the plural in the terminal letter. Os-sin in modern Algonquin (the Chippewa dialect), is stone, or rock. Ing, is the local form of all nouns proper.  The term may be rendered simply place of rocks.

NYAC.—­This appears to be the name of a band of Indians who lived there.  The termination in ac, is generally from acke, land.