In 1860 her husband died in Florence. To occupy her mind, Mrs. Somerville began to write another book. She was now over eighty, and her hand was not so steady as it used to be, but she had her eyesight and all her faculties, and with her pet mountain-sparrow sitting on her arm, she wrote daily from eight in the morning till twelve.
Five years later she had the energy to go all over an ironclad ship, which she was very curious to see.
“I was not even hoisted on board,” she wrote to her son, but mounted the ladder bravely, and examined everything in detail “except the stoke-hole!”
At the age of ninety she still studied in bed all the morning, but “I am left solitary,” she says, with pathos, “for I have lost my little bird, who was my constant companion for eight years.”
One morning her daughter came into the room, and being surprised that the little bird did not fly to greet her as usual, she searched for it, and found the poor little creature drowned in the jug!
In 1870 an eclipse of the sun interested Mrs. Somerville very much; it came after a huge thunder-storm, and was only visible now and then between dense masses of clouds. The following year there was a brilliant Aurora lighting up the whole sky; many ignorant people were very frightened, because it had been said the world was coming to an end, and they thought that a bright piece of the Aurora was a slice of the moon that had “already tumbled down!”
Though at the age of ninety-two her memory for names and people failed, she could still read mathematics, solve problems, and enjoy reading about new discoveries and theories in the world of science.
Some months before her death, she was awakened one night at Naples to behold Mount Vesuvius in splendid eruption. It was a wonderful sight.
A fiery stream of lava was flowing down in all directions; a column of dense black smoke rose to more than four times the height of the mountain, while bursts of fiery matter shot high up into the smoke, and the roaring and thundering never ceased for one single moment.
Three days later extreme darkness surprised everyone; Mrs. Somerville saw men walking along the streets with umbrellas up, and found that Vesuvius was sending out an immense quantity of ashes like fine sand, and neither land, sea, nor sky were visible.