Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/764

which was in progress, without taking time for changing dress, and many a lace ruffle^[1] was torn or bespattered by molten pitch, etc., besides the danger to which he continually exposed himself by the uncommon precipitancy of all his actions, of which we had a sample one Saturday evening, when both brothers returned from a concert between eleven and twelve o'clock, my eldest brother pleasing himself all the way home with being at liberty to spend the next day (except a few hours' attendance at chapel) at the turning-bench; but, recollecting that the tools wanted sharpening, they ran with a lantern and tools to our landlord's grindstone, in a public yard, where they did not wish to be seen on a Sunday morning. But my brother William was soon brought back fainting by Alexander, with the loss of one of his finger-nails. . . .

"My time was much taken up with copying music and practising, besides attendance on my brother when polishing, since, by way of keeping him alive, I was constantly obliged to feed him by putting victuals in his mouth. This was once the case when, in order to finish a seven-foot mirror, he had not taken his hands off from it for sixteen hours together. Generally I was obliged to read to him, while he was at the turning-lathe or polishing mirrors, 'Don Quixote,' 'Arabian Nights Entertainment,' the novels of Sterne, Fielding, etc. ; serving tea and supper without interrupting the work, and sometimes lending a hand. I became in time as useful a member of the workshop as a boy might be to his master in the first year of his apprenticeship. But, as I was to take a part the next year in the oratorios, I had for a twelvemonth two lessons per week from Miss Fleming, the celebrated dancing-mistress, to drill me for a gentle-woman (God knows how she succeeded!). So we lived on, without interruption."

On her first public appearance as the leading treble singer in the oratorios, her brother gave her ten guineas for her dress, and on the occasion the proprietor of the theatre pronounced her an ornament to the stage. If she had chosen to persevere, her biographer says her reputation as a singer would have been secure, but, like a woman, she thought more of securing her brother's success than her own. She steadily declined to sing in public unless he was conductor. Besides regular Sunday services, she sang in concerts and oratorios at Bath and Bristol, all the while carrying on her housekeeping with one servant. In this way for ten years at Bath she went on "singing when she was told to sing, copying when she was told to copy, lending a hand in the workshop," and sympathizing with all the intensity of her nature in the course of events, which ended by her brother becoming "the king's astronomer." She sang with him for the last time at Bath, on Whitsunday, 1782.

The following extract narrates the course of events that led to her becoming her brother's constant assistant in his astronomical work:

"My brother, applied himself to perfect his mirrors, erecting in his garden a stand for his twenty-foot telescope. Many trials were necessary before the required motions for such an unwieldy machine could be contrived. Many attempts were made by way of experiment against a mirror, before an intended thirty-foot telescope could be completed, for which, between-whiles (not interrupting the observations with seven, ten, and twenty foot, and writing papers

1. She means her brother's ruffles. In those days lace was worn by gentlemen, and she elsewhere speaks of knitting ruffles for her brother.