34 HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK 



greater trials to tem ig tV-m ma 



peopla These were troubles which worried her through 

 life, though a reader may smile at the recital of Cin- 

 derella's Mitr-rin^s. Of tlir poverty in her childhood's 

 Hanover home, she wrote when she was seventy-- 

 years of age, an. I li.-i back again to the ]'!.< 

 :%" she S.M; 1 Hi i In-w l.ivMth. ;nnl where the 



fint twenty-two yean <!' my life (I'mm my eighth \VMI- 

 mi) liM<l hern sMcriliced to the service of my family unl-i- 

 the utmost self -privation without the least prospect or 

 hope of future reward." Even then her trouhle with 

 servants never left her: 1 may ju-rhaps be spai 

 long confinement before I leave this world, else such 

 M thin^ MS a trusty servant is, I believe, hardly to be 

 met with in this city of Hanover, which, along with 

 the people in it, are so altered since the French occu- 

 pation and the return of the military with their 

 extravagant and dissipated notions, imbibed when in 

 Spain and England, with their great pensions, which 

 they draw from the latter country, that it is quite a 

 new world, peopled with new beings, to what I left it 

 in 1772." 



This young housekeeper and singer found herself in 

 a world of astronomical talk, for which she had no 

 liking, when she left her humble home in Hanover with 

 her brother William. For six days and nights they 

 travelled in the open and inconvenient poatwagen of 

 those times to the seacoast at Hellevoetsluis, where 

 they were to take ship for England So clear were 

 the nights that William pointed out to his sister the 

 stars and constellations of the northern sky. Arrived 

 at Bath, she was launched on the study of music and 

 the practice of singing, but during the long nights of 



