character of Harry, depicted what she conceived the childhood of Mr. Watt might have been. The mental fatigue of Mr. Watt at this period was often so great, that I have heard he required from nine to eleven hours' sleep to recruit his powers, and his evenings were uniformly spent in some light amusing reading. Mrs. Watt was exactly the needful help to her scientific husband, to whom she was wholly devoted, and whose fame she considered her crowning glory. It is remarkable that when Mrs. Watt was a little girl of three or four years old, and Mr. Watt was mourning the loss of his first wife, she came up to his knee, and looking in his face, told him not to grieve, for she would be his little wife and make him happy, and so, some twenty years afterwards, she actually became. Mr. Watt had one son and one daughter by his first marriage. The daughter died early, and the son was on the Continent, so that my acquaintance was with the children of the second marriage. Gregory, as I have said, was a boy of talent, but his high estimate of himself made him at this period anything but a pleasant, though often an informing companion. His sister Jessy, he held, as he did all girls, in supreme contempt; and of this I, both a girl and his sister's frequent companion, was a large partaker. Nor did he trouble himself to conceal his feelings. I became a good deal acquainted with Jessy Watt, and used very often to be allowed to visit her; and though, at such times, Gregory's salutation to his sister and me often was, "Girls are insufferable bores; I wonder what use they are in creation; no woman ever yet had sense to tune a harpsichord;" yet, notwithstanding 288 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF M. A. SCHIMMELPENNINCK. this, he was very glad to get our help in his amuse ments. In one part of a very pleasant garden behind the house, was a clay-pit, where he would send us to dig out clay, and then get us to help him in making models of fortifications. I had read at my grandfather's the volume of Rapin's History of England, containing the wars of King William in the Low Countries, in which the plans of all the fortifications are given. These, at Gregory's desire, I was to trace on silver paper, and numerous were the fortresses we formed from them, in various beds of the garden, to the gardener's great annoyance. I loved to have explained to me the bastion, the ravelin, the redoubt, the citadel, the curtain, and various other things, on which Gregory Watt used to descant, as I thought, very learnedly; and nothing pleased me more than when, in two opposite beds, he had raised one fortification on Coehorn's system, and the other on Vauban's, and then entered into their comparative merits. After we had helped him for two or three hours, and were quite fatigued with such hard work, he would turn round, meaning to be very gracious, and say, "Well, though women are fools, they might, perhaps, be of some use, if they were always directed by men." And on one occasion not see that the only he turned to me and said, "Do you use of women is to do the will of men?" I answered, "And one other use, I think, is, to have that patience with men, which they never would have with each other!" CHAPTER I. 1793-1798. "The merest seeming trifle is ordered as the morning light, And He that rideth on the hurricane is pilot of the bubble in the breaker." TUPPER. NONE, I think, can have read the preceding autobiography without regretting its abrupt termination, and uniting with me in the earnest wish that it had been continued through the more interesting periods of the author's life. It was dictated to me at intervals during the years 1854, 1855, and 1856. It shows, though but in part, the remarkable character of its author; and the peculiar, and, in some respects, unfavourable influences under which that character unfolded; while we trace how amidst all the touching sorrows of her childhood she was in God's good providence watched over and nurtured, and even in those early days fashioned stroke by stroke, that she might become meet for the Master's use, a precious stone for His temple. It now only remains for me, in accordance with the wishes of my beloved and honoured relative, to complete the record |