November 16th.
STUDIES AND OCCUPATIONS.
McCormick has established a school of navigation, and has three good pupils in Barnum, Charley, and McDonald. There is indeed quite a thirst for knowledge in that quarter known as "Mariner's Hall," and an excellent library, which we owe to the kindness of our Boston friends, is well used. In the cabin there is a quiet settlement into literary ease. Dodge has already consumed several boxes of "Littell's Living Age" and the "Westminster Review." Knorr studies Danish, Jensen English, and Sonntag is wading through Esquimau, and, with his long, mathematical head, is conjuring up some incomprehensible compound of differential quantities. As for myself, there is no end to my occupations. The routine of our life causes me much concern and consumes much of my time. Perhaps I give myself needless anxiety about the affairs of my household, and charge myself uselessly with "that care which is the enemy of life," and which long ago disturbed the earthly career of the good old Mother Hubbard; but then I find in it my chief satisfaction, and the leisure hours are filled up pleasantly enough with a book or a walk or this journal. On me the days of darkness have not yet begun to hang heavily, but I can see weariness in the future.
November 17th.
The temperature has fallen to 10° below zero, for which we are duly thankful. Again the air sparkles with cold, and a dead calm has let the frost cover the whole outer bay with ice, and the crystal plain extends as far as the eye will carry over the Sound.
The tide-register works quite well, but the youngsters complain bitterly of the trouble in keeping the fire-hole clear of ice, and of reading the ice-coated knots in the darkness. Starr slipped partly into the hole to-day, and nearly ruined the instrument by grasping it for support. The readings are generally quite accurate, but to guard against serious error I have my own way of making a check upon the ice-foot. We have to-day 9 feet 7 inches between ebb and flood.
HUNTING FOXES.
The poor foxes have become the innocent victims of a new excitement. They are very numerous, and the officers are after them with dead-falls, traps, and guns. Their skins are very fine and pretty, and make warm coats, although I do not perceive that they are used for this purpose; but they go instead into the very safest corners of their lockers. Doubtless "there's a lady in the case."
November 18th.
A calm, cold, clear, quiet day, marked by no unusual event other than the appearance of the second number of "The News." Radcliffe brought it out, and there was another bright evening in this darkness-beleaguered schooner.