y." When in poverty, so deep that he fasted all that day because
he had not a penny to buy a dinner, he attended a meeting of the
Association of Baptist Churches at Olney, not far off. There he first
met with his lifelong colleague, the future secretary of the mission,
Andrew Fuller, the young minister of Soham, who preached on being men
in understanding, and there it was arranged that he should preach
regularly to a small congregation at Earls Barton, six miles from
Hackleton. His new-born humility made him unable to refuse the duty,
which he discharged for more than three years while filling his
cobbler's stall at Hackleton all the week, and frequently preaching
elsewhere also. The secret of his power which drew the
Northamptonshire peasants and craftsmen to the feet of their fellow was
this, that he studied the portion of Scripture, which he read every
morning at his private devotions, in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

This was Carey's "college." On the death of his first master, when he
was eighteen, he had transferred his apprenticeship to a Mr. T. Old.
Hackleton stands on the high road from Bedford and Olney to
Northampton, and Thomas Scott was in the habit of resting at Mr. Old's
on his not infrequent walks from Olney, where he had succeeded John
Newton. There he had no more attentive listener or intelligent talker
than the new journeyman, who had been more influenced by his preaching
at Ravenstone than by that of any other man. Forty years after, just
before Scott's death, Dr. Ryland gave him this message from Carey:--"If
there be anything of the work of God in my soul, I owe much of it to
his preaching when I first set out in the ways of the Lord;" to which
this reply was sent: "I am surprised as well as gratified at your
message from Dr. Carey. He heard me preach only a few times, and that
as far as I know in my rather irregular excursions; though I often
conversed and prayed in his presence, and endeavoured to answer his
sensible and pertinent inquiries when at Hackleton. But to have
suggested even a single useful hint to such a mind as his must be
considered as a high privilege and matter of gratitude." Scott had
previously written this more detailed account of his intercourse with
the preaching shoemaker, whom he first saw when he called on Mr. Old to
tell him of the welfare of his mother:

"When I went into the cottage I was soon recognised, and Mr. Old came
in, with a sensible-looking lad in his wo