even praised her dead hero. "Now we talk of biographies," she wrote twelve years afterwards, "I have no less than nine of my poor brother, and heard of two more, one by Zach, which I shall try to get sight of. There is but one or two which are bordering on truth, the rest being stuff, not worth while to fret about. The best is accompanied with a miniature of Reberg's bad copy." "Bordering on truth! stuff!" Her description of her own racy letters is equally amusing: "I was in hopes you would have thrown away such incoherent stuff . . . and not to let it rise in judgment against my, perhaps, bad grammar, bad spelling, etc."
Even a small matter became great where his name was concerned. "The following hint is only to you as a dear sister," she writes to her brother's widow, "for as such I now know you:—All I am possessed of is looked upon as their own, when I am gone; the disposal of my brother's picture is even denied me—it hangs in Mrs. H.'s drawing-room, where a set of old women play cards under it on her club day." Summary also was her judgment of anyone who attempted to rival or surpass her brother: "The fellow is a fool." Great was her excitement on learning that her nephew was preparing to complete in the southern hemisphere the gauging of the heavens, which his father had begun, and for many a year carried on in the northern. That was allowable. It was a war trumpet blown within hearing of a war horse, that had served its last campaign. "Dr. Tias, who travelled through Hanover, called on me to-day," she writes to Lady Herschel. "He talked strangely about my nephew's intention of going to the Cape of Good Hope. Mr. Hausmann told
