"It would be impossible for me," she also writes, "if it were required, to give a regular account of all that passed around me in the lapse of the two following years, for they were spent in a perfect chaos of business. The garden and workrooms were swarming with labourers and workmen, smiths and carpenters going to and fro between the forge and the forty-foot machinery, and I ought not to forget that there is not one screw-bolt about the whole apparatus but what was fixed under the immediate eye of my brother. I have seen him lie stretched many an hour, in a burning sun, across the top beam whilst the iron-work for the various motions was being fixed. At one time no less than twenty-four men (twelve and twelve relieving each other) kept polishing day and night; my brother, of course, never leaving them all the while, taking his food without allowing himself time to sit down to table."
Miss Herschel's services to her brother, as well as to science as an independent discoverer, were recognised, when, in 1787, she was appointed assistant to her brother at a salary of £50 per annum.
In the following year, after she had enjoyed the closest companionship and identity with her brother for sixteen years, Mr. Herschel's marriage brought a considerable change in the life of the sister. Her devotion to his interests and pursuits became no less, but the supreme place by his side was gone.
Although Miss Herschel seems to have felt keenly the separation from her brother in domestic life, her zeal in the objects to which he had devoted himself never waned. Having entered upon them from a sense of grateful love, she became passionately attached to the work. Although living apart from him, she continued to the end of his life to be his indefatigable assistant, as well as an independent observer of the heavens. In this character she came into contact from time to time not only with members of the Royal families of England and Germany, but with the leading astronomers of the age, who acknowledged in her an honoured comrade. A celebrated astronomer, referring to one of the many comets she was the first to discover, says in a letter to her: "I am more pleased than you can well conceive that you have made this discovery. You have immortalised your name, and you deserve such a reward from the Being who has ordered all these things to move as we find them, for your assiduity in the business of an astronomer, and for your love for so celebrated and deserving a brother."