Page:Memoir and correspondence of Caroline Herschel (1876).djvu/81

Rh washhouse into a forge, and manufacturing complete sets of tools required for the work he was to enter upon. Many expensive tools also were furnished by the ironmongers in Windsor, as well for the forge as for the turner and brass man. In short, the place was at one time a complete workshop for making optical instruments, and it was a pleasure to go into it to see how attentively the men listened to and executed their master's orders; I had frequent opportunities for doing this when I was obliged to run to him with my papers or slate, when stopped in my work by some doubt or other.

I cannot leave this subject without regretting, even twenty years after, that so much labour and expense should have been thrown away on a swarm of pilfering work-people, both men and women, with which Slough, I believe, was particularly infested. For at last everything that could be carried away was gone, and nothing but rubbish left. Even tables for the use of workrooms vanished: one in particular I remember, the drawer of which was filled was slips of experiments made on the rays of light and heat, was lost out of the room in which the women had been ironing. This could not but produce the greatest disorder and inconvenience in the library and in the room into which the apparatus for observing had been moved, when the observatory was wanted for some other purpose; they were at last so encumbered by stores and tools of all sorts that no room for a desk or an Atlas remained. It required my utmost exertion to rescue the manuscripts in hand from destruction by falling into unhallowed hands or being devoured by mice. But I will now return to July, 1786, when my brother was obliged to deliver a ten-foot telescope as a present from the King to the Observatory of Göttingen. Before he left Slough on July 3rd, the stand of the forty-foot telescope stood on two circular walls capped with Portland stone