CHAP, vi.] Her Nephews Book. 243 



MISS HERSCHEL TO ,T. F. TV. HERSCHEL, ESQ. 



March, 1831. 



MY DEAREST NEPHEW, 



If it was not high time to congratulate you on your 

 "birthday of which I most heartily wish you may enjoy 

 man}- returns in uninterrupted and increasing happiness I 

 might have still deferred to thank you for your kind letter 

 and the valuable present of your book. I intend to follow 

 your mother's example to read it " from end to end," which 

 I was hitherto not able to do on account of my dim eyes ; 

 hut now the days are getting longer I think I see better, 

 and to judge hy the few pages I have read, that so far from 

 making me go to sleep, it will he an antidote against a 

 propensity for doing so in the daytime. 



I much regret my inability to acknowledge my dear 

 niece's letter in such a manner as might encourage a corre- 

 spondence with me, hut it is difficult to write in a cheerful 

 strain when one is continually in the dismals. I do all I 

 can to keep up my spirits under a daily increase of my in- 

 firmities, and have been best part of the winter confined to 

 my rooms. My complaint is incurable, for it is a decay of 

 nature, and nine days after your birthday I am eighty-one. 

 What a shocking idea it is to be decaying ! decaying ! But 

 never mind if I am decaying here, there will be, as Mrs. 

 Maskelyne once was comforting me (on observing my grow- 

 ing lean), " the less corruption in my grave ! " 



22n(L Some weeks ago I wrote as above, which I in- 

 tended as a preface to my dying speech, with intention to 



give you a few hints concerning , and indeed I may sa}^ 



of all my German relations, except the Knipping family. 

 If I did not fear that some of them would, after my decease, 

 introduce .themselves as troublesome correspondents to you, 

 I would rather write about something else just now, and 

 indeed I had better drop the subject, for you will know, I 



R 2 



