tsman, and therefore the university was not for such
as he. Like his school-fellows, he seemed born to the English
labourer's fate of five shillings a week, and the poorhouse in sickness
and old age. From this, in the first instance, he was saved by a
disease which affected his face and hands most painfully whenever he
was long exposed to the sun. For seven years he had failed to find
relief. His attempt at work in the field were for two years followed
by distressing agony at night. He was now sixteen, and his father
sought out a good man who would receive him as apprentice to the
shoemaking trade. The man was not difficult to find, in the hamlet of
Hackleton, nine miles off, in the person of one Clarke Nichols. The
lad afterwards described him as "a strict churchman and, what I
thought, a very moral man. It is true he sometimes drank rather too
freely, and generally employed me in carrying out goods on the Lord's
Day morning; but he was an inveterate enemy to lying, a vice to which I
was awfully addicted." The senior apprentice was a dissenter, and the
master and his boys gave much of the talk over their work to disputes
upon religious subjects. Carey "had always looked upon dissenters with
contempt. I had, moreover, a share of pride sufficient for a thousand
times my knowledge; I therefore always scorned to have the worst in an
argument, and the last word was assuredly mine. I also made up in
positive assertion what was wanting in argument, and generally came off
with triumph. But I was often convinced afterwards that although I had
the last word my antagonist had the better of the argument, and on that
account felt a growing uneasiness and stings of conscience gradually
increasing." The dissenting apprentice was soon to be the first to
lead him to Christ.

William Carey was a shoemaker during the twelve years of his life from
sixteen to twenty-eight, till he went to Leicester. Poverty, which the
grace of God used to make him a preacher also from his eighteenth year,
compelled him to work with his hands in leather all the week, and to
tramp many a weary mile to Northampton and Kettering carrying the
product of his labour. At one time, when minister of Moulton, he kept
a school by day, made or cobbled shoes by night, and preached on
Sunday. So Paul had made tents of his native Cilician goatskin in the
days when infant Christianity was chased from city to city, and the
cross was a reproach only less bitter