Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/764

744 which was in progress, without taking time for changing dress, and many a lace ruffle was torn or bespattered by molten pitch, etc., besides the danger to which he continually exposed himself by the uncommon precipitancy of all his actions, of which we had a sample one Saturday evening, when both brothers returned from a concert between eleven and twelve o'clock, my eldest brother pleasing himself all the way home with being at liberty to spend the next day (except a few hours' attendance at chapel) at the turning-bench; but, recollecting that the tools wanted sharpening, they ran with a lantern and tools to our landlord's grindstone, in a public yard, where they did not wish to be seen on a Sunday morning. But my brother William was soon brought back fainting by Alexander, with the loss of one of his finger-nails. . ..

On her first public appearance as the leading treble singer in the oratorios, her brother gave her ten guineas for her dress, and on the occasion the proprietor of the theatre pronounced her an ornament to the stage. If she had chosen to persevere, her biographer says her reputation as a singer would have been secure, but, like a woman, she thought more of securing her brother's success than her own. She steadily declined to sing in public unless he was conductor. Besides regular Sunday services, she sang in concerts and oratorios at Bath and Bristol, all the while carrying on her housekeeping with one servant. In this way for ten years at Bath she went on "singing when she was told to sing, copying when she was told to copy, lending a hand in the workshop," and sympathizing with all the intensity of her nature in the course of events, which ended by her brother becoming "the king's astronomer." She sang with him for the last time at Bath, on Whitsunday, 1782.

The following extract narrates the course of events that led to her becoming her brother's constant assistant in his astronomical work:

"My brother, applied himself to perfect his mirrors, erecting in his garden a stand for his twenty-foot telescope. Many trials were necessary before the required motions for such an unwieldy machine could be contrived. Many attempts were made by way of experiment against a mirror, before an intended thirty-foot telescope could be completed, for which, between-whiles (not interrupting the observations with seven, ten, and twenty foot, and writing papers