All the way to Canal Street, then through divers unexplored
directs to Christopher.  Just in time.  Turkey, Christmas pudding
&c � Walk out with boys, buying sweetmeats for �em and pulling
em along in toy-sleigh.  Back again, brandy and water, almonds
raisins and talk.  Evening telling the boys fairy tales.   Left after
a pleasantly passed day at about 10.    Altogether wrong was I in
thinking them chilly; � spleen and loneliness bred the idea, and I�m
ashamed of it, now.		        Returning, divers young fellows
doing the same from their new year�s calls, many with �gigantic
bricks in their hats,� (id est, New York phrase for bacchi-plenus.)
Crossing the ferry talk with a german, from down south, where
he �had lost two niggers by Cholera!�       First time I have met a dab-
bler in the accursed traffic.
  2. Wednesday. �Mose� all day.  Evening, got hold of a certain
fictitious �Diary of Lady Willoughby,� (during the Parliamentary wars of
Charles the First.    It is a deliciously written thing, and more than
once affected me even to tears.   Exquisitely are the feelings of wife &
mother told, and exquisite are the little incidents given.  Of her hus-
band  �I thought as he drew nigh, how comely was his countenance�.
  And of the incident of finding the whipp of her dead child, taking it
up in her cloak and weeping over it.   /        The writer of this
must be an exquisitely minded creature, and I do not doubt a wo-
man.  /		I cannot but think that love of country was more