Sugar ’em, and butter ’em, and clap ’em in your muns.”
The two lads, as they came home, began in jest to repeat the cry. Matthew was an admirable mimic, and had caught it exactly. To their surprise they found themselves beset with purchasers. “Not having face enough to reject demands which we had provoked, perhaps not unwilling to carry on the jest, we soon emptied our basket, and had to return for more, deeming ourselves, however, well recompensed for the additional trouble by the profits arising from the difference between the wholesale price, at which we had been allowed to purchase, and the retail price at which we had sold.” The elder of these two lads the town, as years went on, received as its Recorder; to the younger it raised a statue in his life-time.
This was not the first time that Rowland had turned dealer. Not long after his family had moved to Hill Top his mother gave him a little plot of land for his garden. It was covered with a crop of hoarhound. This he was going to clear away to make room for his flowers, but he was told that it had a money value. “I cut it properly, tied it up in bundles, and, borrowing a basket of my mother, set off one morning on a market-day—Thursday, as I remember—with my younger brother Arthur as my sole companion, for the market-place of the town; and, taking my stand like any other caterer, soon disposed of my wares, receiving eightpence in return. Fortunately I was saved the tediousness of retail dealing, the contents of my basket being purchased in the gross by a woman who had taken her stand near, and who, I hope, cleared a hundred per cent. by the transaction, though she disparaged her bargain by warning me to tell my mother, ‘She must tie up bigger bunches next time.’”
By the age of nine he had saved half-a-guinea, which he laid out on a box of colours. His first great purchase, however, was, as he told me, the volumes of Miss Edgeworth’s “Parent’s Assistant.” These cost him fifteen shillings. “Hers was a name which he could never mention but with gratitude and respect.” I once asked him what were the books that had chiefly formed his character. He answered that he thought he owed most to Miss Edgeworth’s stories. He read them first when he was about eight or nine years old, and he read them a great many times. He said, and the tears came into his eyes as he spoke, that he had resolved in these early days to be like the characters in her stories, and to do something for the world. “I had always had,” he said to me at another time, “a very strong desire to do something to make myself remembered.”
“While yet a child, and long before his time,
Had he perceived the presence and the power
Of greatness.”
Most of his spare money was laid out, however, in the purchase of tools and materials. With such old wood as they could lay hands on, and such new wood as they could afford to buy, he and his brothers set about building a flat-bottomed boat in which they meant to sail through the Birmingham and Worcester Canal into the Severn, and up the Severn to their uncle at Shrewsbury. They had no more misgivings about their scheme than Robinson Crusoe had about his escape from his island in his canoe. Yet there was certainly one great bar to their plan, of which, however, they knew nothing. The canal, at this time, had not been carried half-way to the Severn. They finished their boat, and, though it was found to be too frail for the canal, nevertheless it carried the bold voyagers across a horse-pond.
In the occupations of the workshop, and even in his regular education, Rowland suffered interruption, not only from frequent attacks of illness, but also from the need that his father was under of employing his children part of each day in household work. He could not afford to keep many servants. While Rowland all his life regretted that he had been taken away from school at an early age, yet the hours that he had passed in the discharge of domestic duties he never looked upon as time misspent.
“I was called upon at a very early age to perform many offices which, in richer families, are discharged exclusively by servants—to go on errands, to help in cleaning, arranging, and even repairing, and, in short, to do any sort of work that lay within my power. By this means I gradually acquired, as will hereafter better appear, a feeling of responsibility, and habits of business, dispatch, punctuality, and independence, which have proved invaluable to me through life.”[23]