Sir David Gill. 
199 
their mutual understanding ; how true and tried their comradeship. She 
shared his successes, and thus added to them ; she helped to bear his 
defeats and disappointments, and thus lessened them. How often did 
one hear him say, " I must tell my wife this," or " Lady Gill will be 
glad to hear that." Eound her happiness always his thoughts turned, 
and any one who reads Six. Months in Ascension" with seeing sym- 
pathy will know what part of her life he filled. 
On his marriage Gill succeeded to his father's business. David Gill, 
senior, was then eighty-one years of age, and although strong and vigorous 
yet he deemed it w^ise to hand over the control of the business to younger 
hands. He lived on for other eight years, living to enjoy his son's 
rising fame as an astronomer. 
Young Gill was now in the full vigour of his early manhood, of con- 
siderable business aptitude, keen, far-seeing, intensely alive. A photo- 
graph of him at this time shows a face little changed in essentials from 
what many of us remember so well. There are the same, clear, thoughtful 
eyes ; the same broad, brooding brow. There is the hint of the large, 
flexible mouth of later years. The face is clean shaven, and the coun- 
tenance has that peculiar softness of expression which one notices in 
almost all portraits of Lord Lister. 
For two years Gill remained in business, through the day occupied in 
the ordinary routine of a successful business concern, and at night wholly 
engaged in exploring the wonders of the midnight sky. In this "other " 
part of his life his work was far from being that of the casual amateur 
following paths of least resistance. His investigations were of such 
merit, originality, and promise that they had already brought him into 
contact, personally and by correspondence, with some of the leading 
astronomers in Britain and on the Continent. Indeed, as early as 1867, 
when he was only twenty-four years of age, he was elected a Fellow of the 
Royal Astronomical Society. 
In 1872 the door was opened to what was to be to him, ever afterwards, 
his real life-work : " One fine day in 1872 I received a letter from the 
Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, offering me charge of the observatory 
which his son (Lord Lindsay) was about to erect at Dun Echt." Gill 
accepted the offer, even although it meant for him very heavy pecuniary 
loss. But the decision was made without any hesitation, and with the 
full concurrence of his wife, who had implicit faith in him and in his 
future. 
As soon as he could wind up his business he did so, and thenceforward, 
as long as life lasted, there were no partition walls in his days. He was 
now wholly devoted to astronomical research. 
Pending the completion of the Dun Echt Observatory Gill paid many 
visits to London and Dublin in connection w^ith the construction of the 
