"I know not how to thank you sufficiently for the cheering
account you give of the climate agreeing so well with you and
all who are so dear to me, and that you find all about you so
agreeable and comfortable;... so that I have nothing left to
wish for but a continuation of the same, and that I may only
live to see the handwriting of your dear Caroline, though I
have my doubts about lasting till then, for the thermometer
standing 80 deg. and 90 deg. for upwards of two mouths, day and night,
in nay rooms (to which I am mostly confined), has made great
havoc in my brittle constitution. I beg you will look to it
that she learns to make her figures as you find them in your
father's MSS., such as he taught me to make. The daughter of a
mathematician must write plain figures.

"My little grand-nephew making alliance with your workmen shows
that he is taking after his papa. I see you now in idea,
running about in petticoats among your father's carpenters,
working with little tools of your own; and John Wiltshire (one
of Pitt's men, whom you may perhaps remember) crying out, 'Dang
the boy, if he can't drive in a nail as well as I can!'

"I thank you for the astronomical portion of your letter, and
for your promise of future accounts of uncommon objects. It is
not _clusters of stars_ I want you to discover in the body of
the Scorpion [the astronomical sign, so called], or thereabout,
for that does not answer my expectation, remembering having
once heard your father, after a long, awful silence, exclaim,
'Hier ist wahrhaftig ein loch ein Himmel!' [Here, indeed, is a
great gap in Heaven!], and, as I said before, stopping
afterwards at the same spot, but leaving it unsatisfied."

These extracts may seem trivial to some of our readers, but they are not
so, rightly considered. They illustrate the wonderful mental vivacity of
their venerable writer, and in this respect are useful; but still more
useful in showing how cheerfully she bore the burden of her years, and
with what intellectual serenity she looked forward to her end.

We own that the lives of the Herschels are what the world would call
uneventful. The discovery of a new planet, or of the orbit of a star,
seems less romantic to the vulgar taste than the slaughter of ten
thousand men on a field of battle. It will seem to the unthink