My spirits were not bright as the day was nor could I yet well account for their dejection. I have made it a practice to reflect upon my many blessings on this day and to have a thankful and cheerful heart for the continuance of the same from year to year. Thankful I am today as ever, but cheerful I did not feel. My situation is now somewhat different from what it has ever been before. I am now the only son, the only child of my parents, the only representative of a distinguished family. I am nevertheless not upon terms of perfect 47cordiality with my father, and I am not sustaining the family character. This is not grateful reflection. I will never indulge it.

My feelings are those of humility and submission to a superior being, but perhaps of improper vanity and pride towards my fellow mortals. My character has made me sit apart from society and has thrown my feelings entirely upon myself. My Wife even with all her generosity, her sympathy and her warmth of heart is only pained by the expression of refinements of feeling whose nature she cannot quite understand. Perhaps it is best for me that she does not for it leads me entirely to suppress any expression of what after all may be fitly called morbid sensibility. Fortune has been perhaps over kind to me this last year. My children are both sources of pleasure to me and pride. Let me humbly confess my weaknesses before my Creator and supplicate him not to deal with me according to my deserts, but to continue to me the mercies which it has been his will hitherto to confer.

At the office today where I did nothing but my Diary which has again run into arrears. The time I now allow myself for business is as short as it can possibly be made. And often I have to postpone my Diary. Walk, Ovid. Mr. and Mrs. Frothingham dined here. Afternoon shortened by it. I only finished the letters of Mr. Digges another of the English Americans who acted as purveyors of intelligence for the Commissioners. Evening quiet, d’Israeli, and Oberon which I find more charming as I go on.

Morning cloudy but it afterwards cleared away. We now have regular winter weather and with no trifling severity. It snows almost every night. Office. Time given to business and Diary. Mr. Degrand called with an offer of some Suffolk Insurance Stock which I closed with as reasonable for Thomas B. Adams.

Walked into State Street. The President of the Office Mr. Perkins asked me if the report was true that my father was selling off Insurance Stock for fear of war with France. Such is the world! What could give rise to this unless conjecture! Could it be a casual remark of mine to the President of the Fire and Marine Office upon my sale of that Stock? This strange notion actually depresses the price of Insurance Stock.

Took my usual walk. After it read Ovid, Roman mythology and quite dull. Afternoon, reviewing and clearing up the rubbish of Papers, accummulated. Evening, d’Israeli and Oberon.