Page:A Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury.pdf/283

Rh short but appropriate speech, as a Doctor of the University of Cambridge; after which the new Doctor took a seat on the left of the Vice-Chancellor. Then came the other three I have already spoken of, and then came nearly forty, in black-silk gowns and furred hoods, who were to be created M.A.'s or B.A.'s. They knelt down before the Vice-Chancellor one by one, and put up their hands like a child saying its prayers; the Vice-Chancellor put his hands outside theirs and said in Latin, 'By the right of my office and the power invested in me, I create you Master of Arts or Bachelor of Arts (as the case might be) in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.'

". . . . Papa presently introduced me to Mr. Adams, the Astronomer-Royal (the man who 'predicted the planet Neptune at the same time that Leverrier did). He went with us and Mrs. Vice-Chancellor to the FitzWilliam Museum that afternoon, and afterwards invited us to a strawberry-feast in his garden."

In 1868 the political objections to Maury's return to his native country had been removed by the enactment of a general amnesty. He had been offered the Directorship of the Imperial Observatory by the Emperor of the French, and the Superintendency of the University of the South at Suwanee; but he declined both. He had accepted the Chair of Physics at the Virginia Military Institute. The buildings at Lexington are in a line with the Washington and Lee University, over which the illustrious General Lee presided as Rector. This fact had no small influence in Maury's choice of Lexington for a home, so highly did he appreciate the pleasure of a renewal of the friendship which existed between them as neighbours in old times, when one lived at the Washington Observatory, the other at his country-seat of Arlington. The two houses were in full view of each other,