27th.  Visited Mr. Paulding (Secretary of the Navy) in the evening.  Found him a father aged bald-headed man, of striking physiognomy, prominent intellectual developments, and easy dignified manners.  It was pleasing to recognize one of the prominent authors of Salmagundi, which I had read in my schoolboy days, and never even hoped to see the author of this bit of fun in our incipient literature.  For it is upon this, and the still higher effort of Irving’s facetious History of New York, that we must base our imaginative literature.  They first taught us that we had a right to laugh.  We were going on, on so very stiff a model, that, without the Knickerbocker, we should not have found it out.

28th.  I prepared a list of queries for the department, designed to elicit a more precise and reliable account of the Indian tribes than has yet appeared.  It is astonishing how much gross error exists in the popular mind respecting their true character.

     Talk of an Indian—­why the very stare
     Says, plain as language, Sir, have you been there? 
     Do tell me, has a Potawattomie a soul,
     And have the tribes a language?  Now that’s droll—­
     They tell me some have tails like wolves, and others claws,
     Those Winnebagoes, and Piankashaws.

30th.  Mr. Paulding transmits a note of thanks for some Indian words.  The euphony of the aboriginal vocabulary impresses most persons.  In most of their languages this appears to result, in part, from the fact that a vowel and a consonant go in pairs—­i.e. a vowel either precedes or follows a consonant, and it is comparatively rare that two consonants are required to be uttered together.  There is but one language that has the th, so common in English. Sh and gh are, however, frequently sounded in the Chippewa.  The most musical words are found in the great Muscogee and Algonquin families, and it is in these that the regular succession of vowels and consonants is found.

31st.  The year 1838 has been a marked one in our Indian relations.  The southern Indians have experienced an extensive breaking up, in their social institutions, and been thrown, by the process of emigration, west of the Mississippi, and the policy of the government on this head, which was first shadowed out in 1825, and finally sanctioned by the act of land exchanges, 1830, may be deemed as having been practically settled.  The Cherokees, who required the movements of an army to induce them to carry out the principles of the treaty of New Echota, have made their first geographical movement since the discovery of the continent, a period of 331 years.  How much longer they had dwelt in the country abandoned we know not.  They clung to it with almost a death grasp.  It is a lovely region, and replete with a thousand advantages and a thousand reminiscences.  Nothing but the drum of the Anglo-Saxon race could have given them an effectual warning to go.  Gen.