“April 15. All the young ladies in this end of the street are getting to be religious. Three or four of them ‘obtaining a hope’ as it is called (where one is convinced of her duty towards God and the light of the everlasting gospel works upon her).
“May 6. Wednesday Samuel North left Watson and Williams and has gone to New York. Samuel was a good fellow and well liked and one and all expressed a regret to lose him.
“May 30. Samuel North was over from Walton and returned on Tuesday. He has been since he was here to New York and obtained a situation in Pearl Street with O. O. Halsted and Company—very good place indeed.
“June 5. Watson is building a new house, almost opposite his store; also Adams is pulling down the old Martin house and is to build a new one this summer.
“June 17. Concert on Thursday evening last at W. H. Scott’s[38] where he had assembled all the finest girls in the neighboring towns as well as of this. He had three pianos and the young ladies played in succession from the youngest to the oldest. The room was crowded with the most respectable audience I ever beheld in this place upon any occasion of the kind.
“June 21. The Indians in the Northwest Territory have declared war against the United States. My old friend E. A. Ogden is with the United States troops in the enemy’s country.”
The building of the brick store, protracted meetings at Esquire Eells’s and a visit from Bishop Onderdonk are chronicled during the next half year:
“July 10. Went in the afternoon to help raise the Adams house. Samuel North returned home. He left the city on account of the cholera which rages hard in New York; 100 to 150 cases a day.
“Who talks about anything else but the cholera: it is prayed and preached and sung and laughed about. The city of New York vomits out its inhabitants by thousands daily as if it had itself got the cholera and was throwing the disturbed contents of its prodigious stomach over the whole country. The steamboats puff and the coaches groan under their heavy loads. When the stage driver winds his melodious horn as he comes round the hill all the good old ladies and some of the men run to the door to see if the cholera is coming.[39]