27th.  Major H. Whiting, U.S.A., writes from St. Augustine, Florida:  “I have been favored with your letter of a month since, it having, I dare say, made all due diligence the post office arrangements admit.  But the time shows the sort of intercourse I am doomed to have with my Detroit friends.  I consider that the country ought to feel under obligations to one who serves her at such a sacrifice.  Indeed, she can make us no adequate return, but to allow me to return—­the only return I ask.  When, however, that favor will be granted is past my guessing.  You ask when the war will terminate?  You could not puzzle any of us more than by putting such a question.  We are more at our wit’s end than the war’s end.  And yet I do not see that anything has been left undone, that might have been done.  The army has moved steadily toward its objects.  But those objects are like a mirage, they are always nearly the same distance off.  What can we do in such a case?

“The army for the last few weeks has been operating in a country that is more than half under water.  It has often been difficult to find a spot dry enough for an encampment.  If the troops do not all come out web-footed, it is because water can’t make a duck’s leg.

“I am on the lookout for specimens.  I have one small alligator’s bones, and have laid in for those of a larger one, an old settler, no doubt going back to Bartram’s days.  Alligators here have suffered more than the Indians in this war.  I should judge that several hundreds have been killed from the boats as they pass up and down.  They all have a bed just in the bank of the river, where they sleep in the sun, and the temptation is too great for any rifle, and they generally wake up a little too late.  Mineral specimens here are not various.  I have collected a few in order to show my friends, who can draw inferences from them.  Shells have had a principal hand in the formation of this peninsula.  They form the ninety-ninth part of the rock in this quarter.  It is a most convenient formation, being worked almost as easily as clay, and yet it makes substantial walls.  Frost, I presume, would play the deuce with it.  But that is a thing not much known here.  I have not yet had the pleasure to fix my northern eye on a piece of ice this winter, though there has been a cream thickness of it once or twice.  A pitcher frozen over here makes more noise than the river frozen over at Detroit.  The frogs have piped here all winter—­happy dogs.  I have been out at all times and in all places, and I don’t think my nose has been blue but once since I have been here—­I have not been blue myself once.  I have not yet been to Ponce de Leon’s spring.  But there are some springs here of a wondrous look.  They are so transparent that the fish can scarce believe themselves there in their own element.  The Mackinack waters are almost turbid to them.  They have a most sulphurous odour, and might renew a man’s youth, but it must be at the expense of all sweet smells.  I would rather keep on than go back on such conditions.