His mother Dorothy was the daughter of Christian Benze of
the village of Velpke, near Braunschweig, and a woman of talent,
industry, and wit, which her son appears to have inherited. The father
died in 1808 after his son had become distinguished. The mother lived
to the age of ninety-seven, but became totally blind. She preserved her
low Saxon dialect, her blue linen dress and simple country manners, to
the last, while living beside her son at the Observatory of Gottingen.
Frederic, her younger brother, was a damask weaver, but a man with a
natural turn for mathematics and mechanics.
When Gauss was a boy, his parents lived in a small house in the
Wendengrahen, on a canal which joined the Ocker, a stream flowing
through Braunschweig. The canal is now covered, and is the site of the
Wilhelmstrasse, but a tablet marks the house. When a child, Gauss used
to play on the bank of the canal, and falling in one day he was nearly
drowned. He learned to read by asking the letters from his friends, and
also by studying an old calendar which hung on a wall of his father's
house, and when four years old he knew all the numbers on it, in spite
of a shortness of sight which afflicted him to the end. On Saturday
nights his father paid his workmen their wages, and once the boy, who
had been listening to his calculations, jumped up and told him that he
was wrong.
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