east encouragement to spend the
star-light nights on a grass-plot covered with dew or hoar-frost,
without a human being near enough to be within call. I knew too little
of the real heavens to be able to point out every object so as to find
it again without losing too much time by consulting the atlas." And, in
another place, she says: "I had, however, the comfort to see that my
brother was satisfied with my endeavors to assist him, when he wanted
another person either to run to the clocks, write down a memorandum,
fetch and carry instruments, or measure the ground with poles, etc., of
which something of the kind every moment would occur." How successful
she was in her sky-sweeping may be judged from the fact that she herself
discovered no less than eight different comets at various times during
her apprenticeship. Her work was not unattended by danger and accidents,
and on one occasion, on a cold and cloudy December night, when a strip
of clear sky revealed some stars and there was great haste made to
observe them, in assisting her brother with his huge telescope she ran
in the dark on ground covered with melting snow a foot deep, tripped,
and fell on a large iron hook such as butchers use, and which was
attached for some purpose to the machine. It entered her right leg,
above the knee, and when her brother called, "Make haste," she could
only answer by a pitiful cry, "I am hooked." He and the workmen were
instantly with her; but they did not free her from the torturing
position without leaving nearly two ounces of her flesh behind, and it
was long before she was able to take her place again at the instrument.

It would be interesting, if it were but practicable, to give a brief
journal of her life during the fifty years she lived in England, from
the time of her arrival in Bath, August 28, 1772, till the time of her
brother's death, August 25, 1822, after which she returned to Hanover.

We have given enough, perhaps, to suggest the mode and the activity of
her life; but of her brother's marriage, and the trial it brought upon
her in giving up the supreme place she had held in his love and
companionship for sixteen years; of the details of her discoveries, and
the interesting correspondence which accompanied them; of her various
great and noble friends, and her relations with them; of the death of
her brother, then Sir William Herschel, and the terrible blow it proved
to her; of her return to Holland, to the home of ano