Miss Herschel describes herself as having fallen into “a kind of stupefaction,” which lasted for many weeks after the loss of her father, and the awakening to life had little of hope in the present or promise for the future, so far as she could see then. At the age of seventeen she had learned little beyond the first elements of education, and she was now deprived of the one friend who encouraged and sympathised with her desire for better instruction. The parents had never agreed on the subject. “When I had left school,” she writes, [Sidenote: 1767. _Early Recollections._] “My father wished to give me something like a polished education, but my mother was particularly determined that it should be a rough, but at the same time a useful one; and nothing farther she thought was necessary but to send me two or three months to a sempstress to be taught to make household linen. Having added this accomplishment to my former ingenuities, I never afterwards could find leisure for thinking of anything but to contrive and make for the family in all imaginable forms whatever was wanting, and thus I learned to make bags and sword-knots long before I knew how to make caps and furbelows.... My mother would not consent to my being taught French, and my brother Dietrich was even denied a dancing-master, because she would not permit my learning along with him, though the entrance had been paid for us both; so all my father could do for me was to indulge me (and please himself) sometimes with a short lesson on the violin, when my mother was either in good humour or out of the way. Though I have often felt myself exceedingly at a loss for the want of those few accomplishments of which I was thus, by an erroneous though well-meant opinion of my mother, deprived, I could not help thinking but that she had cause for wishing me not to know more than was necessary for being useful in the family; for it was her certain belief that my brother William would have returned to his country, and my eldest brother not have looked so high, if they had had a little less learning. * * * * *