of the building of this grand instrument, which it would be a mistake to overlook.
Caroline Herschel had difficulties with servants from her earliest days of housekeeping. No one pleased her; whether because, having been intended for a household drudge herself by her mother and her brother Jacob, she was too exacting when it came to her turn to lord it over others, or from the ignorance and disregard to right of the class servants were drawn from, we cannot tell. But her account of the workmen whom her brother employed on the great telescope paints the employed of those days in colours more black, and more incredible, than we are warranted in receiving without scruple. For some weeks in the summer of 1786 she was left in charge at Slough, while her brother was absent in Hanover on a scientific mission from the King, charged in fact with conveying to the University of Göttingen a 10-feet reflector, constructed by Herschel, and presented by the King for the Observatory, which had already taken high rank in Europe. "There were no less than thirty or forty of my brother's workpeople," she writes, "at work for upwards of three months together, some employed in felling and rooting out trees, some digging and preparing the ground for the bricklayers who were laying the foundation for the telescope, and the carpenter in Slough, with all his men. The smith, meanwhile, was converting a washhouse into a forge, and manufacturing complete sets of tools for the work he was to enter on. . . . In short, the place was a complete workshop for making optical instruments, and it was a pleasure to go into it to see how attentively the men listened to and executed their master's orders."
