Can you tell time by the star clock?

Can you tell the seasons by the star calendar?

Have you ever looked at the beautiful pictures in the sky? There is the Dragon in the north. There are the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper. There is the Hunter of the Sky, Orion, and his Dog. Have you seen the Dog Star jumping?

When Maria Mitchell was a little girl on Nantucket Island, more than a hundred years ago, she knew all these stars and more. Her father was an astronomer. Every minute Maria could spare from helping her mother, she spent looking through his telescope and listening to his wonderful stories of the stars. There was always plenty to do in that big family! There was a baby to rock and dishes to wash and floors to sweep and beds to make. And then there was school.

Maria didn't think she'd like school. She didn't like the stories in the readers. She had heard about children who had to sit on the high stool in the corner because they didn't know their lessons. But when she found out that school also meant arithmetic, which she loved, and lots of new kinds of problems, then she was very happy.

She helped the other children with their arithmetic. "I don't know what one and one is!" sobbed little Fanny. "Thee has one eye on this side of thy nose," said Maria, "and one eye on that side. How much is one and one?" "Two!" cried Fanny. Soon she knew two and two, and even four and five!

Being a Mitchell was great fun. There were always brothers and sisters to play with as well as to work with. And Mr. Mitchell was more fun than the children. When they went to the beach to gather driftwood, he was ready to play horse, or to tell the names of the many lovely shells the children collected, or to put Maria on the piece of driftwood that looked like a camel so that she could ride on its hump!

But Maria's greatest fun, her greatest joy, was in the evenings she spent with her father at his telescope. She learned to help him correct the sailor's clocks, or chronometers, until she could actually do it by herself. She learned to tell the seasons by the star calendar, and the time by the star clock. The stars became her friends. Once when she was lost with a playmate on the beach in a heavy fog, the stars guided her way. Then she knew why the stars were so important to sailors. Her father showed her the very ones that led Columbus to the New World.

Maria too became a discoverer. Instead of exploring the ocean like Columbus, she explored the skies with a telescope. Instead of a new continent, she discovered a new comet! She became the outstanding woman astronomer of America, Professor of Astronomy at the first all-woman college, Vassar, and earned her place in the Hall of Fame.

Her story has the freshness of a Nantucket breeze. It is told with a zest and skill that bring very close to young readers the bright, happy girl who is its heroine and the stars who were her friends.

From the dust jacket