constant study in the intervals of his Bath music lessons, makes itself
everywhere distinctly felt.

Meanwhile, the family at Hanover had not been flourishing quite so
greatly as the son William was evidently doing in wealthy England.
During all those years, the young man had never forgotten to keep up a
close correspondence with his people in Germany. Already, in 1764,
during his Yorkshire days, William Herschel had managed out of his
savings as an oboe-player to make a short trip to his old home; and his
sister Carolina, afterwards his chief assistant in his astronomical
labours, notes with pleasure the delight she felt in having her beloved
brother with her once more, though she, poor girl, being cook to the
household apparently, could only enjoy his society when she was not
employed "in the drudgery of the scullery." A year later, when William
had returned to England 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