Page:Women worth emulating (1877) Internet Archive.djvu/57

Rh a kind look and word for his little sister, which fell on her heart like dew upon a drooping flower.

There was a younger child than Caroline, who completed the family group, Alexander, a fine boy, the care of whom fell to the lot of the sister five years his elder.

Never was there a harder worked child than Caroline Herschel. She had to do the actual drudgery of the house, and in her life calls herself "Cinderella,"—running errands, nursing the baby, washing up after meals, mending the clothes, filled all the time that she was not at the garrison school, which of course, with all the enforced punctuality of a German child, she attended. It is affecting to read such statements as the following, of her early recollections. The incident occurred before she was seven years of age, and her father was returning home after an absence:—

"My mother being very busy preparing dinner, had suffered me to go alone to the parade to meet my father, but I could not find him anywhere, nor anybody whom I knew; so at last, when nearly frozen to death, I came home and found them all at table. My dear brother William threw down his knife and fork, and ran to welcome me, and crouched down to me, which made me forget all my grievances. The rest were so happy at seeing one another again, that my absence had never been perceived."

In another place she says, "I was mostly, when not in school, sent with Alexander to play on the