“Mr. Pearson’s visit led to intimacy between the families, especially as regards the children; and as his eldest daughter had attained the age of five, while I was no more advanced than six, the two were naturally thrown much together, and, in fact, took the first step towards that intimacy and affection which some twenty-five years later were cemented by marriage. One whimsical little passage in these earliest days I must record. Under the high road, in the part nearest to my father’s house, ran what is in the midland counties called a culver (that is a long low arch), placed there for the passage of the rivulet, which turned my little water-wheel. Into this culver my brother and I occasionally crept by way of adventure, and at times to hear the noise of a wagon as it rumbled slowly overhead. Into this ‘cool grot and mossy cell’ I once led my new companion, both of us necessarily bending almost double; and I cannot but look back upon the proceeding as probably our earliest instance of close association and mutual confidence. Many years later we revisited the spot together, but found the passage completely silted up, so as to be inaccessible to future wooers, however diminutive.”
At the age of three or four, Rowland was nearly carried off by the scarlet fever. So ill he was that for a short while his father and mother thought that he had ceased to breathe. The attack left him weak for some years. “I have never overcome,” he wrote in his eighteenth year, “and most probably never shall quite overcome, the effects of that illness. Ever since I can remember I have suffered much from sickness.” He had to pass many hours of every day lying on his back. He used to beguile the time by counting. He assisted himself, as he said, by a kind of topical memory. “My practice was to count a certain number, generally a hundred, with my eye fixed on one definite place, as a panel of the door, or a pane in the window, and afterwards, by counting-up the points, to ascertain the total.” He here first showed that love of calculation which so highly distinguished him in after life. His health remained so feeble that he had passed his seventh birthday before he was taught his letters. Backward though he was in book-learning, he was really a forward child. At the age of five he had made himself a small water-wheel, rude enough no doubt. Yet it worked with briskness in a little stream near his father’s house. A water-wheel had always a great charm for him. He had been taken to see one before he was three years old, and he used to cry to be taken to see it again. When he was an old man he would go miles out of his way to see one at work. The year after he made his wheel, when he was now six, he and his brother Edwin, a boy of eight, built themselves a small model-forge of brick and mortar. The wheel was about two feet and a-half across, and was pretty fairly shaped. It was turned by a stream from the spout of the pump. The axle, which they made out of the stem of a cherry-tree, cost them a good deal of trouble:—
“We attempted to connect our machinery by means of a crank with the handle of the pump, expecting that if we once gave it a start the water would turn the wheel, while this would not only work the forge, but also maintain, by its operation on the pump, the stream necessary to its own movement. In short, we looked for a perpetual motion, and were greatly disappointed to find motion at an end as soon as our own hands were withdrawn from the pump. When we mentioned our perplexity to my father, after informing us that our attempt was hopeless, and giving us such explanation as we could understand, he consoled us under our discomfiture by telling us that many persons, much older and wiser than ourselves, had expended time, labour, and money, in the same fruitless quest.”[22]
A few years after this his father himself came across one of these dreamers. He was taken by a friend to see a machine for producing perpetual motion. The inventor boasted of his success. “There,” he said, “the machine is.” “Does it go?” the visitor asked. “No, it does not go, but I will defy all the world to show why it does not go.”
The lads happily had a fair supply of tools. Their father, in his boyhood, had been fond of using them, and had kept some of them so carefully that they were quite serviceable for his sons. In three old looms that had belonged to their grandfather they found an abundant supply of materials.
Their life at Horsehills, if somewhat hard, was far from being unhappy. A few years after they had left the neighbourhood, Rowland and his elder brothers passed through Wolverhampton on the top of a stagecoach. At a certain point of the road the three boys stood up in order to get a glimpse of their old home. A gentleman seated by them, on learning what they were gazing at, said, “to our no small gratification,” as Rowland remembered, “that we must have been good lads when we lived there, since we were so fond of the place.”
CHAPTER II.
When Rowland Hill was seven years old a great change took place in the family life. His mother had always thought very highly of her husband’s powers and learning. She knew that he was fit for some higher kind of work than any he had hitherto done. She longed, moreover, to procure for her children a better education than any that then seemed likely to be within their reach. One of their friends, Mr. Thomas Clark, kept a school in Birmingham, of which he was willing to dispose. He also had been a member of Dr. Priestley’s congregation, and in the midst of the riots had shown great courage. “Church and King” had been the cry of the mob, and “Church and King” chalked on the house-door was no small safeguard against its fury. Some friendly hand had written these words on the door of the schoolmaster’s house. As soon as he saw them he at once rubbed them out. With this brave and upright man Thomas Hill became in later years closely connected by marriage. His elder daughter married one of Mr. Clark’s sons. Mrs. Hill persuaded her husband to give up his business in Wolverhampton, and to buy the school. They removed it to a convenient house called Hill Top, on the outskirts of Birmingham. Here Rowland passed the next sixteen years of his life. Here—