ommanding officer for
permission to accept, and it was refused. They never met, and much to
the regret of the Fairfax family the letter of Washington was lost. The
Fairfaxes of Virginia are of the same family, and occasionally some
member of the American branch returns to see his Scotch cousins.

"While Dr. Somerville was eagerly talking of these things, Mrs.
Somerville came tripping into the room, speaking at once with the
vivacity of a young person. She was seventy-seven years old, but
appeared twenty years younger. She was not handsome, but her face was
pleasing; the forehead low and broad; the eyes blue; the features so
regular, that in the marble bust by Chantrey, which I had seen, I had
considered her handsome.

"Neither bust nor picture, however, gives a correct idea of her, except
in the outline of the head and shoulders.

"She spoke with a strong Scotch accent, and was slightly affected with
deafness, an infirmity so common in England and Scotland.

"While Mrs. Somerville talked, the old gentleman, seated by the fire,
busied himself in toasting a slice of bread on a fork, which he kept at
a slow-toasting distance from the coals. An English lady was present,
learned in art, who, with a volubility worthy of an American, rushed
into every little opening of Mrs. Somerville's more measured sentences
with her remarks upon recent discoveries in _her_ specialty. Whenever
this occurred, the old man grew fidgety, moved the slice of bread
backwards and forwards as if the fire were at fault, and when, at
length, the English lady had fairly conquered the ground, and was
started on a long sentence, he could bear the eclipse of his idol no
longer, but, coming to the sofa where we sat, he testily said, 'Mrs.
Somerville would rather talk on science than on art.'

"Mrs. Somerville's conversation was marked by great simplicity; it was
rather of the familiar and chatty order, with no tendency to the essay
style. She touched upon the recent discoveries in chemistry or the
discovery of gold in California, of the nebulae, more and more of which
she thought might be resolved, and yet that there might exist nebulous
matters, such as compose the tails of comets, of the satellites, of the
planets, the last of which she thought had other uses than as
subordinates. She spoke with disapprobation of Dr. Whewell's attempt to
prove that our planet was the only one inhabited by reasoning beings;
she believed that a higher order of beings t