Page:Women worth emulating (1877) Internet Archive.djvu/64

48 me to judge, I think there is no record of such hard, various, and continued study and work as that which was performed by this remarkable woman. Her brother's career was extraordinary, but he had the advantage of a good, sound, early education, and habits of study fostered by his father's approbation. Caroline had merely been able to gather the crumbs of knowledge that fell around her in her childhood's home, and to devour them in secrecy and fright, being far more likely to have blame than praise. All the deficiencies of her early mental training she had now to make up, as well as to pursue tasks wholly unusual to her sex. At night she watched the heavens with her brother, regardless of, yet not without feeling, cold and weariness. Once, on a bitter December night, she records, that in making some alteration in the machinery of the telescope, she slipped on the snowy ground, and was impaled on an iron hook. "My brother's call, 'Make haste,' I could only answer by a pitiful cry, 'I am hooked.' He and the workman were instantly with me; but they could not lift me without leaving nearly two ounces of my flesh behind. The workman's wife was called, but was afraid to do anything; and I was obliged to be my own surgeon, by applying aquabusade (water bandages) and tying kerchiefs about it for some days." The wound was bad for a long time; and a physician told her that had a soldier met with such a hurt he would have been entitled to six weeks' nursing in hospital.