Morning cold and cloudy. The Easterly winds for a few days have chilled the air. I passed an hour at the Office, looking over books which have now, since the farmer’s retirement, found a resting place.1

Attended divine service and heard Mr. Lunt from Romans. 5. 4. “And patience, experience; and experience, hope.” A very beautiful Sermon upon the experience of religion illustrated in many ways. John 6. 12. “Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.” Upon economy as discriminated from carelessness and profuseness on the one hand and parsimony on the other. This is the first practical discourse, I have heard from Mr. Lunt and was a very good one.

Read a Sermon of Sterne. Genesis 47. 9. “And Jacob said unto Pharaoh, the days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years; few and evil have the days of the years of my life been.” Jacob’s history is one of the most remarkable in the Bible, and features 296of it are touched off with great beauty and delicacy in this discourse, but there is more leniency in it than in one of Mr. Frothingham’s upon the same person. Jacob was not happy in life, perhaps he did not deserve to be but if so how came he to be the founder of a race of elect?

My little Louisa was six years old this day. She has enjoyed health somewhat improving within a few months, a circumstance of much comfort as I had been anxious about her. May she go on flourishing, if it is the will of God. Evening at home. My mother not well and in her room where we spent an hour.