[Sidenote: 1822. _Retrospection._] While they toiled together through those first ten years of ever-deepening interest and marvellous activity, during which the rapid juxtaposition of mirror-grinding, concerts, oratorios, music lessons,[30] and frequent papers written for philosophical societies, almost takes the breath away as we read,—the brother had abundant opportunity of learning how far he could trust to his companion’s readiness, as well as capability, to accept of duties as utterly remote from all that her previous life had prepared her for as if he had asked her to accompany him on a pilgrimage to Mecca. And thus, of all of whom he had made trial, it was not the brilliant Jacob, nor the gifted Alexander, but the little quiet, home-bred Caroline, of whom nothing had been expected but to be up early and to do the work of the house, and to devote her leisure to knitting and sewing, in whom he found that _steady devotion to a fixed purpose_ which he felt it was possible to link with his own. “I did nothing for my brother,” she said, “but what a well-trained puppy-dog would have done: that is to say, I did what he commanded me. I was a mere tool which _he_ had the trouble of sharpening.” Such was always her own modest self-estimate. It is hardly too much to say that, to have worked as she had worked, and to have done all that she had accomplished, and to claim no more than the credit due to passive obedience to orders, is a depth of humility of that rare and noble kind which is in itself a form of greatness. It must not be forgotten, that the progress of astronomical science since Sir William Herschel’s great reflector startled the world, has not been greater than has been the change, both in opinion and practice, on the subject of female employments and education. The appointment of a young woman as an assistant astronomer, with a regular salary for her services, was an unprecedented occurrence in England. She had watched and shared in every effort and every failure from the first seven-foot telescope to the construction of the ponderous machinery that was to support the mighty tube of which she herself made the first crude model in pasteboard. When, finally, her brother was summoned to the King, and wrote to tell her how he fared at Court, she accepted the decision, by which he exchanged a handsome income for the sake of obtaining the command of his own time, and £200 a-year from his gracious sovereign, with only a passing expression of regret from the housekeeper’s point of view, and threw herself heart and soul into the new life at Datchet. One all-sufficing reward sweetened her labours—“I had the comfort to see that my brother was satisfied with my endeavours in assisting him.” When the dignity of original discovery gave her a distinct and separate claim to the respect of the astronomical world, she must have found out that she was something better than a mere tool. The requisite knowledge of