raise of a young German
they had in their band, who was really, he said, a most remarkable and
spirited performer. Dr. Miller asked to see (or rather hear) this
clever musician; so Herschel was called up, and made to go through a
solo for the visitor's gratification. The organist was surprised at
his admirable execution, and asked him on what terms he was engaged to
the Durham militia. "Only from month to month," Herschel answered.
"Then leave them at the end of your month," said Miller, "and come to
live with me. I'm a single man; I think we can manage together; and
I'm sure I can get you a better situation." Herschel frankly accepted
the offer so kindly made, and seems to have lived for much of the next
five years with Miller in his little two-roomed cottage at Doncaster.
Here he took pupils and performed in the orchestra at public concerts,
always in a very quiet and modest fashion. He also lived for part of
the time with a Mr. Bulman at Leeds, for whom he afterwards generously
provided a place as clerk to the Octagon Chapel at Bath. Indeed, it is
a very pleasing trait in William Herschel's character that to the end
he was constantly engaged in finding places for his early friends, as
well as for the less energetic or less fortunate members of his own
family.

During these years, Herschel also seems to have given much attention to
the organ, which enabled him to make his next step in life in 1765,
when he was appointed organist at Halifax. Now, there is a great
social difference between the position of an oboe-player in a band and
a church organist; and it was through his organ-playing that Herschel
was finally enabled to leave his needy hand-to-mouth life in Yorkshire.
A year later, he obtained the post of organist to the Octagon Chapel at
Bath, an engagement which gave him new opportunities of turning his
mind to the studies for which he possessed a very marked natural
inclination. Bath was in those days not only the most fashionable
watering-place in England, but almost the only fashionable
watering-place in the whole kingdom. It was, to a certain extent, all
that Brighton, Scarborough, Buxton, and Harrogate are to-day, and
something more. In our own time, when railways and steamboats have so
altered the face of the world, the most wealthy and fashionable English
society resorts a great deal to continental pleasure towns like Cannes,
Nice, Florence, Vichy, Baden, Ems, and Homburg; but in the eighteenth