CHAPTER XI
HERSCHEL'S ENGLISH HOME
So long as Herschel's house was conducted by his sister Caroline, it could scarcely be called an English home. To all intents and purposes it was a German household, ruled by a German mistress, and conducted according to German ways. When he married the widow of a London merchant, Mrs. Pitt, his sister, who had been for some time kept unusually busy with papers and calculations, wrote, as she was withdrawing from this household management, "It may easily be supposed that I must have been fully employed (besides minding the heavens) to prepare everything as well as I could against the time I was to give up the place of a housekeeper, which was the eighth of May, 1788." She continued to mind the heavens; but she had a good deal also to do with the earth.
Of the lady to whom Herschel was married, of himself, and of his sister we have excellent word-pictures, drawn by Miss Burney and her father. Caroline, who for fourteen years had devoted her life to her brother's studies, and who continued to show the same devotion for sixty more, though resigning the post of housekeeper, remained to help him in his pursuits and to watch over his health. Reading the brief entries in her diary, we cannot help concluding that in many
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