It is sad enough to see the number of families that are ruined by drink at the present time; but in Livesey's early days people suffered even more from drunkenness than they do now.
The weavers used to keep Monday as a day of leisure; and the public-houses were crowded from morning till night with men and women, who drank away their earnings to the last penny.
In the church to which Joseph Livesey belonged the ringers and singers were hard drinkers, the gravedigger was a drunkard, and the parish clerk was often intoxicated!
Living amidst so much sin and misery, this frail lad determined to strive his hardest to assist others. He found Sunday a day of rest and rejoicing to him "a feast of good things," and became a Sunday-school teacher and preacher.
So far as worldly matters went he was not at all successful in early life. Weaving was so badly paid that he tried several other trades, but only to meet with failure.
At the age of twenty he received a legacy of a few pounds; and soon after, having saved a little money, married a good and true woman, who helped him much throughout life.
"Our cottage," says Mr. Livesey in his autobiography, "though small, was like a palace; for none could excel my Jenny for cleanliness and order. I renovated the garden, and made it a pleasant place to walk in. On the loom I was most industrious, working from early in the morning often till ten, and sometimes later, at night; and she not only did all the house work, but wound the bobbins for three weavers—myself, uncle, and grandfather; and yet, with all this apparently hard lot, these were happy days."
But it was not all sunshine at first. He fell ill, and the doctor ordered him better living than he had been getting; and where the money was to come from to get more nourishing food Livesey knew not.
He had been ordered to take some cheese in the forenoon, so he bought a piece at about eightpence a pound; and as he munched it came this thought: cheese wholesale cost but fivepence per pound; would it not be possible to buy a piece wholesale and sell it to his friends, so that he too might have the benefit of getting it at this low price?
No sooner thought of than done. But, when he had finished weighing out the cheese to his friends, he found he had made, quite unexpectedly, a profit of eighteenpence, and that it was more than he could have gained by a great deal of weaving.