Page:Memoir and correspondence of Caroline Herschel (1876).djvu/95

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Chap. II.]
Employments at Slough.
73

11th. I completed to-day the catalogue of the first thousand.

12th. . . . . calculated 200 nebulæ of the second thousand.

13th. Professor Kratzensteine, from Copenhagen, was here to-day. In the evening I saw the comet and swept.

14th. . . . I calculated 140 nebulæ to-day, which brought me up to the last discovered nebulæ, and, therefore, this work is finished.

15th. I went up with Mrs. H. to Windsor to pay some bills and to buy several articles against my brother's return.

16th. . . . .my brothers returned about three in the afternoon.

It would be impossible for me, if it were required, to give a regular account of all that passed around me in the lapse of the following two years, for they were spent in a perfect chaos of business. The garden and workrooms were swarming with labourers and workmen, smiths and carpenters going to and fro between the forge and the forty-foot machinery, and I ought not to forget that there is not one screw-bolt about the whole apparatus but what was fixed under the immediate eye of my brother. I have seen him lie stretched many an hour in a burning sun, across the top beam whilst the iron work for the various motions was being fixed.

At one time no less than twenty-four men (twelve and twelve relieving each other) kept polishing day and night; my brother, of course, never leaving them all the while, taking his food without allowing himself time to sit down to table.

The moonlight nights were generally taken advantage of for experiments, and for the frequent journeys to town which he