Page:Women worth emulating (1877) Internet Archive.djvu/61

This page has been validated.
MISS CAROLINE HERSCHEL.
45

senger to the Continent in comfort in a few hours; then, Miss Herchel travelled six days and nights in an open postwagen, and then embarked at Helvoetsluys, on a stormy sea, to the packet-boat, two miles distant; and she and her brother were, she says, "thrown on shore by the English sailors like balls, at Yarmouth, for the vessel was almost a wreck, without a main and another of the masts."

Her troubles were not over on landing; for after a hasty breakfast, brother and sister mounted some sort of cart, to take them to the place where the London coach passed. They were upset into a ditch, fortunately dry, and came off with only a fright; some kind fellow-passengers, who accompanied them to London, helping them.

Poor Caroline entered the metropolis bareheaded, having lost her hat, amid her other troubles of the way. The landlady of the inn in the city lent her a bonnet, and thus equipped, she made one short excursion, to see something of the metropolis. Curiously enough, among all the fine shops she noticed only one with an interested and longing gaze—it was an optician's. But they could not linger. That same night saw them on the way to Bath, where they arrived, she says, "almost annihilated, having been only twice in bed during their twelve days' journey."

It must have been a strange new life to the little German girl at Bath. Her brother William was organist at the Octagon chapel, director of the