, such as he taught me to make. The daughter of a
mathematician must write plain figures.
"My little grand-nephew making alliance with your workmen shows
that he is taking after his papa. I see you now in idea,
running about in petticoats among your father's carpenters,
working with little tools of your own; and John Wiltshire (one
of Pitt's men, whom you may perhaps remember) crying out, 'Dang
the boy, if he can't drive in a nail as well as I can!'
"I thank you for the astronomical portion of your letter, and
for your promise of future accounts of uncommon objects. It is
not _clusters of stars_ I want you to discover in the body of
the Scorpion [the astronomical sign, so called], or thereabout,
for that does not answer my expectation, remembering having
once heard your father, after a long, awful silence, exclaim,
'Hier ist wahrhaftig ein loch ein Himmel!' [Here, indeed, is a
great gap in Heaven!], and, as I said before, stopping
afterwards at the same spot, but leaving it unsatisfied.
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