again, and had just received his appointment as organist at
Halifax, his father, Isaac, had a stroke of paralysis which ended
his violin-playing for ever, and forced him to rely thenceforth
upon copying music for a precarious livelihood. In 1767 he died,
and poor Carolina saw before her in prospect nothing but a life of
that domestic drudgery which she so disliked. "I could not bear
the idea of being turned into a housemaid," she says; and she
thought that if only she could take a few lessons in music and
fancy work she might get "a place as governess in some family where
the want of a knowledge of French would be no objection." But,
unhappily, good dame Herschel, like many other uneducated and
narrow-minded persons, had a strange dread of too much knowledge.
She thought that "nothing further was needed," says Carolina, "than
to send me two or three months to a sempstress to be taught to make
household linen; so all that my father could do was to indulge me
sometimes with a short lesson on the violin when my mother was
either in good humour or out of the way. It was her certain belief
that my brother William would have returned to his country, and my
eldest brother would not have looked so high, if they had had a
little less learning." Poor, purblind, well-meaning, obstructive
old dame Herschel! what a boon to the world that children like
yours are sometimes seized with this incomprehensible fancy for
"looking too high"!

Nevertheless, Carolina managed by rising early to take a few
lessons at daybreak from a young woman whose parents lived in the
same cottage with hers; and so she got through a little work before
the regular daily business of the family began at seven. Imagine
her delight then, just as the difficulties after her father's death
are making that housemaid's place seem almost inevitable, when she