"When I see that girls who are required by their parents to go through with the irksome practising really become respectable performers, I wonder what four hours a day at something which they loved, and for which God designed them, would do for them.
"I should think that to a real scientist in music there would be something mortifying in this rush of all women into music; as there would be to me if I saw every girl learning the constellations, and then thinking she was an astronomer!
"Jan. 8, 1876. At the meeting of graduates at the Deacon House, the speeches that were made were mainly those of Dr. R. and Professor B. I am sorry now that I did not at least say that the college is what it is mainly because the early students pushed up the course to a collegiate standard.
"Jan. 25, 1876. It has become a serious question with me whether it is not my duty to beg money for the observatory, while what I really long for is a quiet life of scientific speculation. I want to sit down and study on the observations made by myself and others."
During her later years at Vassar, Miss Mitchell interested herself personally in raising a fund to endow the chair of astronomy. In March, 1886, she wrote: "I have been in New York quite lately, and am quite hopeful that Miss ---- will do something for Vassar. Mrs. C., of Newburyport, is to ask Whittier, who is said to be rich, and ---- told me to get anything I could out of her father. But after all I am a poor beggar; my ideas are small!"
Since Miss Mitchell's death, the fund has been completed by the alumnae, and is known as the Maria Mitchell Endowment Fund. With $10,000 appropriated by the trustees it amounts to $50,000.
"June 18, 1876. I had imagined the Emperor of Brazil to be a dark, swarthy, tall man, of forty-five years; that he would not really have a crown upon his head, but that I should feel it was somewhere around, handy-like, and that I should know I was in royal presence. But he turns out to be a large, old man,--say, sixty-five,--broad-headed and broad-shouldered, with a big white beard, and a very pleasant, even chatty, manner.
"Once inside of the dome, he seemed to feel at home; to my astonishment he asked if Alvan Clark made the glass of the equatorial. As he stepped into the meridian-room, and saw the instruments, he said, 'Collimators?' I said, 'You have been in observatories before.' 'Oh, yes, Cambridge and Washington,' he replied. He seemed much more interested in the observatory than I could possibly expect. I asked him to go on top of the roof, and he said he had not time; yet he stayed long enough to go up several times. I am told that he follows out, remarkably, his own ideas as to his movements."