Meanwhile, the family at Hanover had not been flourishing quite so greatly as the son William was evidently doing in wealthy England.  During all those years, the young man had never forgotten to keep up a close correspondence with his people in Germany.  Already, in 1764, during his Yorkshire days, William Herschel had managed out of his Savings as an oboe-player to make a short trip to his old home; and his sister Carolina, afterwards his chief assistant in his astronomical labours, notes with pleasure the delight she felt in having her beloved brother with her once more, though she, poor girl, being cook to the household apparently, could only enjoy his society when she was not employed “in the drudgery of the scullery.”  A year later, when William had returned to England again, and had just received his appointment as organist at Halifax, his father, Isaac, had a stroke of paralysis which ended his violin-playing for ever, and forced him to rely thenceforth upon copying music for a precarious livelihood.  In 1767 he died, and poor Carolina saw before her in prospect nothing but a life of that domestic drudgery which she so disliked.  “I could not bear the idea of being turned into a housemaid,” she says; and she thought that if only she could take a few lessons in music and fancy work she might get “a place as governess in some family where the want of a knowledge of French would be no objection.”  But, unhappily, good dame Herschel, like many other uneducated and narrow-minded persons, had a strange dread of too much knowledge.  She thought that “nothing further was needed,” says Carolina, “than to send me two or three months to a sempstress to be taught to make household linen; so all that my father could do was to indulge me sometimes with a short lesson on the violin when my mother was either in good humour or out of the way.  It was her certain belief that my brother William would have returned to his country, and my eldest brother would not have looked so high, if they had had a little less learning.”  Poor, purblind, well-meaning, obstructive old dame Herschel! what a boon to the world that children like yours are sometimes seized with this incomprehensible fancy for “looking too high”!

Nevertheless, Carolina managed by rising early to take a few lessons at daybreak from a young woman whose parents lived in the same cottage with hers; and so she got through a little work before the regular daily business of the family began at seven.  Imagine her delight then, just as the difficulties after her father’s death are making that housemaid’s place seem almost inevitable, when she gets a letter from William at Bath, asking her to come over to England and join him at that gay and fashionable city.  He would try to prepare her for singing at his concerts; but if after two years’ trial she didn’t succeed, he would take her back again to Hanover himself.  In 1772, indeed, William in person came over to fetch her, and thenceforth the brother and sister worked unceasingly together in all their undertakings to the day of the great astronomer’s death.