“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?” “No, darling,” said grandmother, “I found out about them in books. And telling you about the girls is getting you ready to read about them all the little things the world has a right to know. For they belong to the whole world. Maria did not learn fancy work. I can guess what she would say of some girls who care more for fancy stitches than for studies. She has said, ‘A woman might be learning seven languages while she is learning fancy work.’ Still, girls, educate your fingers, and make your homes pretty and attractive. But don’t let stitches hinder the stars—God has his place for both.” “Yes, the women worked pretty things for the Tabernacle,” I said. (For I love to make pretty things.)