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Rh afterwards entirely reunited. The Guard was ordered to England, and Isaac Herschel, with his two sons and his son-in-law, accompanied it. Mrs. Herschel kept house as well as she could, with much straitened means; but the family circumstances were not improved by the arrival of Mrs. Griesbach, the married daughter, whose husband marched with the rest, but forgot to leave any part of his pay for the support of his wife.

Even at that time the characteristic genius of William Herschel had begun to show itself. His talk was of the discoveries and theories of Newton, Leibnitz, and Euler; his recreation the invention and fashioning of scientific instruments, in which he was assisted by his brother Alexander. After a year's absence the regiment returned, and it is recorded that William's sole purchase brought from England was a copy of Locke on the "Human Understanding." Jacob, his brother, a much less amiable character, who seems always to have been regarded with feelings akin to terror in the Herschel household, threw up his appointment in the band, in consequence of a slight which he considered himself to have suffered, by the appointment of another musician to a post he coveted. He appeared in Hanover in smart English clothes to set his mother's household by the ears, while his father and brother accompanied their regiment on its homeward march.

William Herschel was the next to leave the band of the Guard, and, however sincerely we may rejoice at an event which left that great man free to become an astronomer and an Englishman, it must be confessed that he did not stand on the order of his going, or waste his time in preliminaries. At the outbreak of hostilities in 1756 the Guard was of course engaged, and the bandmaster, with his son William, marched among the rest. The Guard was attached to the ill-starred force under the Duke of Cumberland, when Marshal d'Estrées was directed, with sixty thousand Frenchmen, first against the Prussian dominions lying on the Rhine, and next against Hanover itself: the British and Hanoverian army, ill-led and outmatched, was at last subjected by D'Estrées to a disastrous defeat at Hartenbeck, on the Weser. The battle took place within twenty miles of Hanover, so that the sufferings of the Hanoverian army were brought almost under the very eyes of their friends. William Herschel, who was always of a delicate frame, suffered so much in health, that, as Miss Herschel says in a memoir written many years after, "his parents resolved to remove him."

The "removal" of a soldier in wartime, without the consent previously obtained of his superiors, is naturally attended with difficulty. Miss Herschel thus tells the story:—

I had only by chance a passing glimpse of my brother as I was sitting at the entrance of our street door when he glided like a shadow along, wrapt in a great coat, followed by my mother with a parcel containing his accoutrements; after he had succeeded in passing unnoticed beyond the last sentinel at Herrenhausen, he changed his dress. My brother's keeping himself so carefully from all notice was undoubtedly to avoid the dangers of being pressed, for all unengaged young men were forced into the service.

As William Herschel was already a soldier, one cannot avoid the suspicion that the danger incurred by his "strategic movement" was not that of being pressed.

William Herschel made his way safely to England, and from that time forth we may claim him as an Englishman. He never again left his adopted country for more than a passing visit.

After his departure evil days fell upon Hanover. The Duke of Cumberland concluded with Richelieu the ignominious Convention of Closterseven, by which thirty-eight thousand Hanoverians laid down their arms and were dispersed. The duke was deprived of all his military commands, but that did not alter the humiliating terms of the treaty. No stipulations were made for the protection of the electorate, and Hanover was therefore plundered without mercy, and laid under enormous contributions. Caroline Herschel was then only about seven years old, but she entertained a lively recollection of the miseries endured by the Hanoverians in that time of national calamity. Sixteen private soldiers of the victorious army were quartered in Mrs. Herschel's house, besides some officers, who took possession of the best apartments. Caroline's time was occupied by attendance at the garrison school, and in learning knitting. The first stocking she made for her brother Alexander reached, she tells us, to her chin when she was finishing the upper rows; and to the end of her life she was always small in stature. Eighty years later, when she was a celebrity, and had come back to her native Hanover to die, she was familiarly known as "the little old lady;" and in letters written in