not be difficult for a determined mind. He had always been of a
mechanical turn, and he was now fired with a desire to build himself a
telescope eighteen or twenty feet long. He sent to London for the
lenses, which could not be bought at Bath; and Carolina amused herself
by making a pasteboard tube to fit them in her leisure hours. It was
long before he reached twenty feet, indeed: his first effort was a
seven-foot, attained only "after many continuous determined trials." The
amateur pasteboard frame did not fully answer Herschel's expectations,
so he was obliged to go in grudgingly for the expense of a tin tube. The
reflecting mirror which he ought to have had proved too dear for his
still 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