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116 This is one and a pleasingly picturesque side of the medal, that might have been struck to commemorate the building of the great reflector. But another and an almost incredible other side is presented on the same page of her Memoirs. "I cannot leave this subject," she says, "without regretting, even twenty years after, that so much labour and expense should have been thrown away on a swarm of pilfering workpeople, 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 with slips of experiments made on the rays of light and heat, was lost out of the room in which the women had been ironing. . . . It required my utmost exertion to rescue the manuscripts in hand from destruction by falling into unhallowed hands or being devoured by mice." A nest of savage South Sea islanders, lifting whatever they could carry away from a house within two or three miles of Windsor Castle in the end of last century may be an accurate picture of the ways and manners of English workpeople then, but it is pardonable to receive it with a smile of incredulity, and to imagine other reasons for the alleged pilfering.

Servants seem to have been a cross which Caroline Herschel never could bear with an equal mind. In 1831, when she was eighty-one, she was as hard to satisfy as in 1772, when she was only twenty-two: "The first thing my radical servant did when she came to me was to break the bottle containing the ink of my