Page:Memoir and correspondence of Caroline Herschel (1876).djvu/73

where "the small twenty-foot" was to be erected; he gaily assured her that they could live on eggs and bacon, which would cost nothing to speak of now that they were really in the country!

The beginning of October, Alexander was obliged to return to Bath. The separation was truly painful to us all, and I was particularly affected by it, for till now I had not had time to consider the consequence of giving up the prospect of making myself independent by becoming (with a little more uninterrupted application) a useful member of the musical profession. But besides that my brother William would have been very much at a loss for my assistance, I had not spirit enough to throw myself on the public after losing his protection.

Poor Alexander! we had hoped at first to persuade him to change Bath for London, where he had the offer of the most profitable engagements, and we should then have had him near us ... but he refused, and before we saw him again the next year he was married.

Much of my brother's time was taken up in going, when the evenings were clear, to the Queen's Lodge to show the King, &c., objects through the seven-foot. But when the days began to shorten, this was found impossible, for the telescope was often (at no small expense and risk of damage) obliged to be transported in the dark back to Datchet, for the purpose of spending the rest of the night with observations on double stars for a second Catalogue. My brother was besides obliged to be absent for a week or ten days for the purpose of bringing home the metal of the cracked thirty-foot mirror, and the remaining materials from his work-room. Before the furnace was taken down at Bath, a second twenty-foot mirror, twelve-inch diameter, was cast, which happened to be very fortunate, for on the