Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/77

Rh phase of society, of which the family is a factor, where engrossing personal fueling will not continue to be a supreme womanly trait.

Resuming our history, we find that on the 1st of August, 1782, the Herschels with their instruments and furniture arrived at Datchet, and took possession of a large and neglected old house, with garden and grounds overgrown with weeds. Having no female servant, Miss Herschel was shown the shops by the gardener's wife, and her practical sense was at once shocked at the prices of everything, from coal to butcher's meat. But her brother was not disturbed by such considerations. He had stables where he could grind mirrors, a roomy laundry for a library, a large grass-plot for his instruments, and "he gayly assured her that they could live on eggs and bacon, which would cost nothing to speak of, now they were really in the country." After a couple of months the younger brother went back to Bath to resume his occupations in music; and it was this separation which awakened Caroline to a consciousness of what she was doing in giving up the prospect of becoming independent in the musical profession. But she reconciled herself to the situation by the thought that her brother William could not do without her, and that she had not spirit enough to throw herself upon the public without his protection. Soon after Alexander's departure, William had to go away for a week or ten days, and she was left alone. She thus describes her feelings in entering upon her new work:

The summer months of 1783 were spent in getting the large twenty-foot ready for the next winter. After some account of her brother's many and incessant occupations, she says he also threw away some