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.

There was little of importance for me to record this day. The cold and east wind was much as usual and I spent perhaps wastefully as much time in the direction of my road. This is however going on now pretty actively. I hope in a few days to finish it, after which there will remain only the inclosure about the house in which there is to be sure much to be done. The workmen are actively engaged in finishing the lower rooms and there will soon be nothing for them to do. I am now beginning to feel a little relief from anxiety by seeing the light at the end of the dark passage.

I read about seventy lines of Homer, and one of the Stories of Simon le Borgne aloud to my Mother. Evening at home. My mind has of late been running much upon the question of the currency and I have entertained an idea that I might elucidate it a good deal if I had time to sit down to write about it. But very seldom do I feel able to sit in the summer steadily to the task.

My Wife requested me to drive to Mrs. Seaver’s, in order that she might be left there to spend the morning, but we met her just starting for town with her husband, and therefore went on to town. My time taken up in the same regular way, Accounts, and commissions. This left me little leisure for any thing else, called to see T. K. Davis twice but without success.

Returned to dinner. Afternoon as usual superintending Kirk whom I now keep busy upon the road, and at the house where they are endeavouring to finish this week, but I very much doubt whether they will 297effect it. There is yet much to be done and only about two months to do it in.

Evening, I finished the first volume of Simon le Borgne. The family sat down to a new German game of which however we did not entirely decypher the directions.