“Either way it takes hard work,” said grandmother.
With a shy glance into his satisfied face she opened her third paper:—
“Children have more need of models than of critics,” said grandmother, “therefore I will give you another model to-night. You will think I am always choosing for you stories of girls that work; but where can I find models of any other kind? What do girls amount to who think only of their own pleasure, and never persevere to the successful end? Now I will tell you about a girl who came in womanhood to live in an observatory. This is her home. She is a dear old lady with white hair, dressed in gray or brown, in rather Quakerish fashion. She said to the girls she teaches: ‘All the clothing I have on cost but seventeen dollars.’ In this unusual home (she is not a grandmother, either), she keeps the things she loves best,—her books, her pictures, her astronomical clock, and a bust of Mary Somerville, of whom I will tell you some time.”
“And then we will remember that her bust is in somebody’s observatory home,” said Bess.
“It is not a wonder that Maria Mitchell has great respect for girls who do something, and for idle girls none at all. As Juliet was at Nantucket last summer she will be interested to know that Maria Mitchell was born in that quiet, delightful place. She was in a home of ten children. Her mother was a Quaker girl, a descendant of Benjamin Franklin. Her father was a school teacher. Little Maria went to school to her father. At school she studied, and with ten little people at home, what do you think she did? She herself calls her work, ‘endless washing of dishes.’ The dishwashing never hindered. I think it helped. I believe in dishwashing. I wonder what this little girl would have thought of the dishwasher that some people have in their kitchens, and is warranted to wash sixty-five dishes (in the smaller affair) at once, in the soap-sudsy, steamy, crank-turning space of three blessed minutes. And all dried, too. But in her observatory she had no need to think of dishwashing. Like Rosa Bonheur, and Harriet Hosmer, she had a good father and a wise father. When he was eight years old his father called him to the door to look at the planet Saturn, and from that time the boy calculated his age from the position of the planet, year by year.”
“Then it began with her grandfather,” said Juliet, who liked to find the beginnings of things.
“Her father had a little observatory of his own, on his own land, that he might study the stars. So it is no marvel that his daughter is ending her useful days in a big observatory. When Maria went to her observatory, her father was seventy years of age; he needed her as nurse and companion, but he said, ‘Go, and I will go with you.’”
“This is the loveliest story of all,” exclaimed Grace, who loves her own old father dearly.
“For four years her father lived to be proud of her, and enjoyed her work and her pupils at Vassar College. When Maria was a girl her father could see no reason why she should not become as well educated as his boys, so he gave her, as to them, a special drill in navigation.”
“Grandmother,” asked Ethel, “did you know all these little girls when they were little?”