Only unchanged the patterned stars endure,
As when they first assured or threatened man,
Still Vega glitters, crystalline and pure,
Still like an angry eye, Aldebaran.

I remember her quoting: "Canst thou bind the sweet influence of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion," nodding her head, as one who says, "I can." She had at her shoulder a postern that opened upon another world.

Mathematics led to the study of astronomy and to navigation. During a summer holiday she acted as navigator on a friend's yacht.

A dinner or a ball was cut short for long hours in the silence and quiet of the observatory of Columbia University, on Madison Avenue. A fellow student recalls a vision in an evening dress of blue and silver entering the observatory in the small hours of the night and, with a smock thrown over her shoulders, sitting down to work before the equatorial.

I quote from a description Alice wrote of her early childhood at Hauxhurst:

We were eight in the family; my grandfather, my two aunts, my parents, and their three children. There were always guests at the house, many of whom, in the old-fashioned way, would stay for months on end. We must have had at least twelve servants; a butler, my grandfather's coachman and my father's, a chef, a cook, two laundresses, grooms, etc.

The butler was the only one of the servants we children disliked; a thin Englishman, with red Dundreary side whiskers. A very severe, stiff man who never relaxed. There was a legend my Uncle Willie once told a story at dinner that made him laugh, obliging him to withdraw to the pantry, and shutting his coat-tails in the door as he did so.

The house was heated entirely by open fires and a stove in the main hall, with a pipe that went curling upstairs like a great black snake. In my nursery, which looked west under the slate roof, was a small soapstone stove. It was the coldest room in winter and the hottest in summer that I ever occupied.

Here, on the deep piazza, the ladies of the house sat and sewed, looking like a group by Renoir. They wore long white ruffled morning gowns, buttoned from chin to toe with flat French linen but-

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