o his interests by
placing their sons under his care. Among those who accompanied him from
Harrow was Samuel Greg. The lad was meant by his uncle to be a
clergyman, but this project he stoutly resisted. Instead of reading for
orders he travelled abroad, acquired foreign languages, and found out
something about the commercial affairs of the continent of Europe. His
uncle died in 1783, and the nephew took up the business. It was the date
of the American Peace. Samuel Greg was carried forward on the tide of
prosperity that poured over the country after that great event, and in a
moderate time he laid the foundation of a large and solid fortune. The
mighty industrial revolution that was begun by the inventions of
Arkwright was now in its first stage. Arkwright's earliest patent had
been taken out a few years before, and his factory in Derbyshire had by
this time proved a practical success. Instead of sharing the brutish
animosity of the manufacturers of Lancashire to the new processes that
were destined to turn their county into a mine of gold, Greg discerned
their immense importance. The vast prospects of manufacturing industry
grew upon his imagination. He looked about him in search of water-power
in the neighbourhood of Manchester, and at length found what he wanted a
dozen miles away at Wilmslow, over the Cheshire border. Here the stream
of the Bollen cuts through a flat and uninteresting table-land, and
forms a pretty valley of its own, as it winds between banks of red
sandstone. When the mill was built, and a house close to it, Quarry Bank
became the home of the family, and it was here that W. R. Greg passed
his childhood, youth, and early manhood.

His mother was fifth in descent from Philip Henry, one of the two
thousand uncompromising divines who were driven out from their benefices
on that Black Bartholomew's Day of 1662, which is still commemorated by
the severer Nonconformists of the old school. His son was the better
known Mathew Henry, whose famous commentary on the Bible has for more
than a century and a half been the favourite manual of devotional
reading in half the pious households all over England and the United
States. Something of the Puritan element was thus brought into the
family. In Ireland the Gregs belonged to the Presbyterians of the New
Light, and their doctrine allowed of a considerable relaxation in the
rigours of older orthodoxy. Many, again, of the Puritans of the North of
England had favour