slender purse, and he thus had to forego it with much regret. But
he found a man at Bath who had once been in the mirror-polishing
line; and he bought from him for a bargain all his rubbish of
patterns, tools, unfinished mirrors and so forth, with which he
proceeded to experiment on the manufacture of a proper telescope.
In the summer, when the season was over, and all the great people
had left Bath, the house, as Carolina says ruefully, "was turned
into a workshop." William's younger brother Alexander was busy
putting up a big lathe in a bedroom, grinding glasses and turning
eyepieces; while in the drawing-room itself, sacred to William's
aristocratic pupils, a carpenter, sad to relate, was engaged in
making a tube and putting up stands for the future telescopes. Sad
goings on, indeed, in the family of a respectable music-master and
organist! Many a good solid shopkeeper in Bath must no doubt have
shaken his grey head solemnly as he passed the door, and muttered
to himself that that young German singer fellow was clearly going
on the road to ruin with his foolish good-for-nothing star-gazing.

In 1774, when William Herschel was thirty six, he had at last
constructed himself a seven-foot telescope, and began for the first
time in his life to view the heavens in a systematic manner. From
this he advanced to a ten-foot, and then to one of twenty, for he
meant to see stars that no astronomer had ever yet dreamt of
beholding. It was comparatively late in life to begin, but
Herschel had laid a solid foundation already and he was enabled
therefore to do an immense deal in the second half of those
threescore years and ten which are the allotted average life of
man, but which he himself really overstepped by fourteen winters.
As he said long afterwards with his modest manner to the poet
Campbell, "I have looked further into space than ever human being