“Farewell, Maria,” said an old Friend, “I hope the Lord will be with thee.”

“Good-by,” she replied, “I know he will be with you.”

A characteristic trait in Miss Mitchell was her aversion to receiving unsolicited advice in regard to her private affairs.  “A suggestion is an impertinence,” she would often say.  The following anecdote shows how she received such counsel: 

A literary man of more than national reputation said to one of her admirers, “I, for one, cannot endure your Maria Mitchell.”  At her solicitation he explained why; and his reason was, as she had anticipated, founded on personal pique.  It seems he had gone up from New York to Poughkeepsie especially to call upon Professor Mitchell.  During the course of conversation, with that patronizing condescension which some self-important men extend to all women indiscriminately, he proceeded to inform her that her manner of living was not in accordance with his ideas of expediency.  “Now,” he said, “instead of going for each one of your meals all the way from your living-rooms in the observatory over to the dining-hall in the college building, I should think it would be far more convenient and sensible for you to get your breakfast, at least, right in your own apartments.  In the morning you could make a cup of coffee and boil an egg with almost no trouble.”  At which Professor Mitchell drew herself up with the air of a tragic queen, saying, “And is my time worth no more than to boil eggs?”

CHAPTER XIII

MISS MITCHELL’S LETTERS—­WOMAN SUFFRAGE—­MEMBERSHIP IN VARIOUS SOCIETIES—­PUBLISHED ARTICLES—­DEATH—­CONCLUSION

Miss Mitchell was a voluminous letter writer and an excellent correspondent, but her letters are not essays, and not at all in the approved style of the “Complete Letter Writer.”  If she had any particular thing to communicate, she rushed into the subject in the first line.  In writing to her own family and intimate friends, she rarely signed her full name; sometimes she left it out altogether, but ordinarily “M.M.” was appended abruptly when she had expressed all that she had to say.  She wrote as she talked, with directness and promptness.  No one, in watching her while she was writing a letter, ever saw her pause to think what she should say next or how she should express the thought.  When she came to that point, the “M.M.” was instantly added.  She had no secretiveness, and in looking over her letters it has been almost impossible to find one which did not contain too much that was personal, either about herself or others, to make it proper; especially as she herself would be very unwilling to make the affairs of others public.

“Oct. 22, 1860.  I have spent $100 on dress this year.  I have a very pretty new felt bonnet of the fashionable shape, trimmed with velvet; it cost only $7, which, of course, was pitifully cheap for Broadway.  If thou thinks after $100 it wouldn’t be extravagant for me to have a waterproof cloak and a linsey-woolsey morning dress, please to send me patterns of the latter material and a description of waterproofs of various prices.  They are so ugly, and I am so ditto, that I feel if a few dollars, more or less, would make me look better, even in a storm, I must not mind it.”