o, and reduced to the
verge of despair, his wife, who had long been suffering from low spirits
and despondency, and his three children, were taken ill; one of the sons
died of small-pox, and the wife eleven days after of low fever and
epilepsy. No money could be got at Prague, so after a short time he
accepted a professorship at Linz, and withdrew with his two quite young
remaining children.

He provided for himself now partly by publishing a prophesying almanack,
a sort of Zadkiel arrangement--a thing which he despised, but the
support of which he could not afford to do without. He is continually
attacking and throwing sarcasm at astrology, but it was the only thing
for which people would pay him, and on it after a fashion he lived. We
do not find that his circumstances were ever prosperous, and though
8,000 crowns were due to him from Bohemia he could not manage to get
them paid.

About this time occurred a singular interruption to his work. His old
mother, of whose fierce temper something has already been indicated, had
been engaged in a law-suit for some years near their old home in
Wuertemberg. A change of judge having in process of time occurred, the
defendant saw his way to turn the tables on the old lady by accusing her
of sorcery. She was sent to prison, and condemned to the torture, with
the usual intelligent idea of extracting a "voluntary" confession.
Kepler had to hurry from Linz to interpose. He succeeded in saving her
from the torture, but she remained in prison for a year or so. Her
spirit, however, was unbroken, for no sooner was she released than she
commenced a fresh action against her accuser. But fresh trouble was
averted by the death of the poor old dame at the age of nearly eighty.

This narration renders the unflagging energy shown by her son in his
mathematical wrestlings less surprising.

Interspersed with these domestic troubles, and with harassing and
unsuccessful attempts to get his rights, he still brooded over his old
problem of some possible connection between the distances of the planets
from the sun and their times of revolution, _i.e._ the length of their
years.

It might well have been that there was no connection, that it was purely
imaginary, like his old idea of the law of the successive distances of
the planets, and like so many others of the guesses and fancies which
he entertained and spent his energies in probing. But fortunately this
time there was a connection, and he l