mental outfit, and wanting in
working assistants; I think the latter did not number more than three
or four, with perhaps a few other temporary employees. There seemed
little prospect of doing much.

On the Washington side was the fact that I was bound to Washington
by family ties, and that, if Harvard needed my services, surely
the government needed them much more. True, this argument was,
for the time, annulled by the energetic assurance of Secretary
Robeson, showing that the government felt no want of any one in
its service able to command a university professorship. But I was
still pervaded by the optimism of youth in everything that concerned
the future of our government, and did not believe that, with the
growth of intelligence in our country, an absence of touch between
the scientific and literary classes on the one side, and "politics"
on the other, could continue. In addition to this was the general
feeling by which I have been actuated from youth--that one ought to
choose that line of activity for which Nature had best fitted him,
trusting that the operation of moral causes would, in the end,
right every wrong, rather than look out for place and preferment.
I felt that the conduct of government astronomy was that line of
activity for which I was best fitted, and that, in the absence
of strong reason to the contrary, it had better not be changed.
In addition to these general considerations was the special point
that, in the course of a couple of years, the directorship of the
Nautical Almanac would become vacant, and here would be an unequaled
opportunity for carrying on the work in mathematical astronomy I
had most at heart. Yet, could I have foreseen that the want of
touch which I have already referred to would not be cured, that I
should be unable to complete the work I had mapped out before my
retirement, or to secure active public interest in its continuance,
my decision would perhaps have been different.

On September 15, 1877, I took charge of the Nautical Almanac Office.
The change was one of the happiest of my life. I was now in a
position of recognized responsibility, where my recommendations met
with the respect due to that responsibility, where I could make plans
with the assurance of being able to carry them out, and where the
countless annoyances of being looked upon as an important factor in
work where there was no chance of my being such would no longer exist.
Practically I had complete