Page:A Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury.pdf/66

52 To see how smatteringly they are taught, look at the great majority of middle aged women of your acquaintance who are educated at these seminaries! . ..

To a young cousin (Lucy Blackford) he says:—

I hope you have a code of rules for study which are unbending, which you follow up daily with great diligence, and that you do not often take doses of poison from those things called novels! Novel reading is, to the student, what mint juleps are to the tippler—most delightful and refreshing at the time, but serpents under the flowers in the end. I often deplore the general state of female education in this country.

In 1847-48 Congress failed to make any appropriation for the NATIONAL OBSERVATORY, and in consequence Maury's pay was stopped for a time. Maury writes of this incidentally in the following letters to his cousins in New York:—

2em . . . . No pay yet, and I am very tired of living on such slender means. Better times, I hope, are coming before long; this poverty is a terrible weight upon one's mind and wants.

2em . . . . The pay has almost passed the House, and I begin to think of increasing expenditure in the way of education, &c., for the children, and church and social facilities, &c., for Nannie.

My "magnetic longitude" trip has been knocked on the head, for the present at least, by the non-arrival of the instruments from Munich.

2em . . . . Congress declared the Superintendent of the "Marine" to mean me, and to mean moreover that the pay should commence from the passage of the Act—thus giving me about $500 extra!