comet." At the same time she could flare up with true feminine fire when it seemed to her that her dignity, as a woman of science, was in any degree infringed. "This puts me in mind of Olbers saying somewhere," she wrote, "I had discovered five comets. Who wanted him to give the number of my comets when he knew them no better? As far as I recollect, Dr. Maskelyne has observed them all, and his observations on them are, I daresay, all printed in the volumes of the Greenwich observations—at least of some he has shown me the proof sheets. I never called a comet mine till several post days were passed without any account of them coming to hand." She was then ninety-two years of age, and Olbers had died more than two years before.
Caroline Herschel maintained to the close of her days the same habits of thrift, the same dread of not getting the two ends to meet, and the same foresight in providing means for ends that characterised her early life. She enjoyed a pension of £50 a year from the Civil List—a small allowance for so deserving a recipient. She had also an annuity of £100 settled on her by her brother's will—a small return, we should say, for the invaluable services she rendered, but a sum which she probably regarded as unnecessarily taken out of her "dear nephew's" pocket. "Let the time come when it may please God," she writes in her eighty-fifth year, "I leave cash enough behind to clear me from all and any obligations to all who here do know me. Even the expenses of a respectable funeral lie ready to enable my friend Mrs. Beckedorff, and one of my nieces to fulfil my directions.
"I hope you will pardon my troubling you with such doleful subjects, but I wish to show you that
