amused herself by sweeping the heavens for comets with a five-feet reflector, of which her brother had made her a present. She was so successful that her fame soon sounded over Europe. "Miss Herschel," one writer reports, "sister of the celebrated astronomer, has observed a comet, and its orbit has been calculated. This is the seventy-third comet of which we know the period." This celestial visitor was talked of in Windsor Castle as the Lady's Comet. Unfortunately, the name was not retained, as it ought to have been, or at least given to a later discovery by Miss Herschel. Between 1786 and 1797 she discovered eight comets altogether, but of only five was she the first discoverer. The seventh, seen by her on November 7, 1795, was specially worthy of this name, but is now known as Encke's Comet. Her value as an assistant to her brother, besides her own personal merit as a woman of science, got for her a pension of £50 from the Civil List, granted to the King by Parliament. It was sufficient for the modest wants of a woman who not only handled a telescope with the dexterity of a practised observer, but, when sixty years of age, spent some of the last days of her stay at Slough" in painting and papering the rooms she was to occupy in a small house of her brother's, attached to the Crown Inn, to which she removed."
Year after year, from 1780 to 1812, the active mind and the prolific pen of William Herschel enriched the Proceedings of the Royal Society with one or more papers, which astonished the world of science and attracted the attention of mankind. The years 1813, 1816 were blanks, but 1814, 1815, 1817, and 1818 showed no feebling of hand or eye, although for years
