about twenty miles to the south of the town; the roads were so bad that even a King's coach, sixty years later, drawn by eight horses, could not make a longer stage than five miles; an invading army would move more slowly. The north road towards the sea was clear of the enemy: and the German outposts extended no farther than the palace at Herrenhausen, about a mile and a half from the town. William Herschel passed these without molestation, journeyed along the Bremen road, and at last found his way to Hamburg, to which his trunk was sent after him. In the following year he appears to have crossed the sea to England. Obscurity then covers the fugitive's wanderings for nearly ten years. Five or six pages of sorrowful details are torn out of his sister's journal at this point; and the way of the wanderer is lost in darkness. More is told by her of the eldest brother's comings and goings, of his rude and ungenerous treatment of her, than of the brother whom she worshipped. We could have taken less of Jacob, and more of William,—"the best and dearest of brothers,"—as the circumstances manifestly required.
After the lapse of seventy years Caroline Herschel felt as keenly as she did at first the unpleasantness of her brother's flight from Hanover. On his return as a King's messenger in 1786, bearing a King's present to the University of Göttingen, the editor of the Göttingen Magazine of Science and Literature got from him some particulars of his early life, which it would have been better if he had not furnished. "In my fifteenth year," he wrote, "I enlisted in military service, only remaining in the army, however, until I reached my nineteenth year, when I resigned, and
