“Jan. 1, 1855.  I put some wires into my little transit this morning.  I dreaded it so much, when I found yesterday that it must be done, that it disturbed my sleep.  It was much easier than I expected.  I took out the little collimating screws first, then I drew out the tube, and in that I found a brass plate screwed on the diaphragm which contained the lines.  I was at first a little puzzled to know which screws held this diaphragm in its place, and, as I was very anxious not to unscrew the wrong ones, I took time to consider and found I need turn only two.  Then out slipped the little plate with its three wires where five should have been, two having been broken.  As I did not know how to manage a spider’s web, I took the hairs from my own head, taking care to pick out white ones because I have no black ones to spare.  I put in the two, after first stretching them over pasteboard, by sticking them with sealing-wax dissolved in alcohol into the little grooved lines which I found.  When I had, with great labor, adjusted these, as I thought, firmly, I perceived that some of the wax was on the hairs and would make them yet coarser, and they were already too coarse; so I washed my little camel’s-hair brush which I had been using, and began to wash them with clear alcohol.  Almost at once I washed out another wire and soon another and another.  I went to work patiently and put in the five perpendicular ones besides the horizontal one, which, like the others, had frizzled up and appeared to melt away.  With another hour’s labor I got in the five, when a rude motion raised them all again and I began over.  Just at one o’clock I had got them all in again.  I attempted then to put the diaphragm back into its place.  The sealing-wax was not dry, and with a little jar I sent the wires all agog.  This time they did not come out of the little grooved lines into which they were put, and I hastened to take out the brass plate and set them in parallel lines.  I gave up then for the day, but, as they looked well and were certainly in firmly, I did not consider that I had made an entire failure.  I thought it nice ladylike work to manage such slight threads and turn such delicate screws; but fine as are the hairs of one’s head, I shall seek something finer, for I can see how clumsy they will appear when I get on the eyepiece and magnify their imperfections.  They look parallel now to the eye, but with a magnifying power a very little crook will seem a billowy wave, and a faint star will hide itself in one of the yawning abysses.

“January 15.  Finding the hairs which I had put into my instrument not only too coarse, but variable and disposed to curl themselves up at a change of weather, I wrote to George Bond to ask him how I should procure spider lines.  He replied that the web from cocoons should be used, and that I should find it difficult at this time of year to get at them.  I remembered at once that I had seen two in the library room of the Atheneum, which I had carefully refrained