34 HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK 



greater trials to temper than buying from market- 

 people. These were troubles which worried her through 

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

 derella's sufferings. Of the poverty in her childhood's 

 Hanover home, she wrote when she was seventy-seven 

 years of age, and had gone " back again to the place 

 where," she says, " I first drew breath, and where the 

 first twenty-two years of my life (from my eighth year 

 on) had been sacrificed to the service of my family under 

 the utmost self-privation without the least prospect or 

 hope of future reward." Even then her trouble with 

 servants never left her : " I may perhaps be spared a 

 long confinement before I leave this world, else such 

 a thing as 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 postwagen 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 



