Page:Memoir and correspondence of Caroline Herschel (1876).djvu/167

Rh services, was an unprecedented occurrence in England. She had watched and shared in every effort and every failure from the first seven-foot telescope to the construction of the ponderous machinery that was to support the mighty tube of which she herself made the first crude model in pasteboard. When, finally, her brother was summoned to the King, and wrote to tell her how he fared at Court, she accepted the decision, by which he exchanged a handsome income for the sake of obtaining the command of his own time, and £200 a-year from his gracious sovereign, with only a passing expression of regret from the housekeeper's point of view, and threw herself heart and soul into the new life at Datchet. One all-sufficing reward sweetened her labours—"I had the comfort to see that my brother was satisfied with my endeavours in assisting him." When the dignity of original discovery gave her a distinct and separate claim to the respect of the astronomical world, she must have found out that she was something better than a mere tool. The requisite knowledge of algebra and mathematical formulæ for calculations and reductions she had to gather when and how she could: chiefly at breakfast, and at any odd moments when her brother could be asked questions, and the answers were carefully entered in her Commonplace Book, where examples of taking equal altitudes, and how to convert sidereal time into mean time, follow upon