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34 greater trials to temper than buying from market-people. These were troubles which worried her through life, though a reader may smile at the recital of Cinderella's sufferings. Of the poverty in her childhood's Hanover home, she wrote when she was seventy-seven years of age, and had gone "back again to the place where," she says, "I first drew breath, and where the first twenty-two years of my life (from my eighth year on) had been sacrificed to the service of my family under the utmost self-privation without the least prospect or hope of future reward." Even then her trouble with servants never left her: "I may perhaps be spared a long confinement before I leave this world, else such a thing as a trusty servant is, I believe, hardly to be met with in this city of Hanover, which, along with the people in it, are so altered since the French occupation and the return of the military with their extravagant and dissipated notions, imbibed when in Spain and England, with their great pensions, which they draw from the latter country, that it is quite a new world, peopled with new beings, to what I left it in 1772."

This young housekeeper and singer found herself in a world of astronomical talk, for which she had no liking, when she left her humble home in Hanover with her brother William. For six days and nights they travelled in the open and inconvenient postwagen of those times to the seacoast at Hellevoetsluis, where they were to take ship for England. So clear were the nights that William pointed out to his sister the stars and constellations of the northern sky. Arrived at Bath, she was launched on the study of music and the practice of singing, but during the long nights of