DROUGHT BY DAY: FROST BY NIGHT 39 



would have assured her a respectable, if not a hand- 

 some income, had her voice been cultivated, as it was 

 not. Others of the family, reading her Memoirs, 

 appear to have shared her sentiments. It is very 

 doubtful. Her brother William "best and dearest 

 of brothers " must have thought otherwise, when he 

 allowed her music lessons to be hindered by marketing, 

 incompetent servants, and other trifles. 



The story told by Herschel himself of his struggles 

 in Bath and afterwards, if less racy, is certainly 

 more wonderful. Encouragement he seems to have 

 had from no one, not even from Caroline, who sub- 

 mitted, not without grumbling, to his whims or 

 caprice. 



He was pursuing his studies with a devotion which, 

 to one who reads the papers he afterwards wrote, calls 

 to mind the devotion of the patriarch in pursuit of his 

 mistress's love. " In the day the drought consumed 

 me, and the frost by night; and my sleep departed 

 from mine eyes." Most literally true was this as a 

 picture of the astronomer's labours at Bath. "The 

 tube of my seven-feet telescope is covered with ice " is 

 his journal entry one autumn night. A month later he 

 writes, " It freezes very hard, and the stars are very 

 tremulous." Two months later, in midwinter, we read, 

 " Not only my breath freezes upon the side of the tube, 

 but more than once have I found my feet fastened to 

 the ground, when I have looked long at the same star." 

 On removing to Windsor, there was no falling away in 

 his devotion to this imperious mistress. " At four o'clock 

 in the morning," he writes on New Year's Day 1783, 

 " my ink was frozen in the room ; and, about five o'clock, 

 a twenty-feet speculum, in the tube, went off with a 



