CHAP, ii.] Removal from Clay Hall to Slough. 59 



washhouse into a forge, and manufacturing complete sets of 

 tools required for the work he was to enter upon. Many 

 expensive tools also were furnished by the ironmongers in 

 Windsor, as well for the forge as for the turner and brass man. 

 In short, the place was at one time a complete workshop for 

 making optical instruments, and it was a pleasure to go into it 

 to see how attentively the men listened to and executed their 

 master's orders ; I had frequent opportunities fou doing this 

 when I was obliged to run to him with my papers or slate, 

 when stopped in my work by some doubt or other. 



I cannot leave this subject without regretting, even 

 twenty years after, that so much labour and expense 

 should have been thrown away on a swarni of pilfering 

 work-people, both men and women, with which Slough, I 

 believe, was particularly infested. For at last everything 

 that could be carried away was gone, and nothing but rubbish 

 left. Even tables for the use of workrooms vanished : one 

 in particular I remember, the drawer of which was filled 

 with slips of experiments made on the rays of light and 

 heat, was lost out of the room in which the women had been 

 ironing. This could not but produce the greatest disorder 

 and inconvenience in the library and in the room into which 

 the apparatus for observing had been moved, when the 

 observatory was wanted for some other purpose ; they 

 were at last so encumbered by stores and tools of all sorts 

 that no room for a desk or an Atlas remained. It 

 required my utmost exertion to rescue the manuscripts in 

 hand from destruction by falling into unhallowed hands or 

 being devoured by mice. 



But I will now return to July, 1786, when my brother 

 was obliged to deliver a ten-foot telescope as a present from 

 the King to the Observatory of Gottingen. Before he left 

 Slough on July 3rd, the stand of the forty-foot telescope 

 stood on two circular walls capped with Portland stone 



