olnshire to Devonshire. If thus there was
Norse blood in William Carey it came out in his persistent missionary
daring, and it is pleasant even to speculate on the possibility of such
an origin in one who was all his Indian life indebted to Denmark for
the protection which alone made his career possible.
The Careys who became famous in English history sprang from Devon. For
two and a half centuries, from the second Richard to the second
Charles, they gave statesmen and soldiers, scholars and bishops, to the
service of their country. Henry Carey, first cousin of Queen
Elizabeth, was the common ancestor of two ennobled houses long since
extinct--the Earls of Dover and the Earls of Monmouth. A third peerage
won by the Careys has been made historic by the patriotic counsels and
self-sacrificing fate of Viscount Falkland, whose representative was
Governor of Bombay for a time. Two of the heroic Falkland's
descendants, aged ladies, addressed a pathetic letter to Parliament
about the time that the great missionary died, praying that they might
not be doomed to starvation by being deprived of a crown pension of L80
a year. The older branch of the Careys also had fallen on evil times,
and it became extinct while the future missionary was yet four years
old. The seventh lord was a weaver when he succeeded to the title, and
he died childless. The eighth was a Dutchman who had to be
naturalised, and he was the last. The Careys fell lower still. One of
them bore to the brilliant and reckless Marquis of Halifax, Henry
Carey, who wrote one of the few English ballads that live. Another,
the poet's granddaughter, was the mother of Edmund Kean, and he at
first was known by her name on the stage.
At that time when the weaver became the lord the grandfather of the
missionary was parish clerk and first schoolmaster of the village of
Paulerspury, eleven miles south of Northampton, and near the ancient
posting town of Towcester, on the old Roman road from London to
Chester. The free school was at the east or "church end" of the
village, which, after crossing the old Watling Street, straggles for a
mile over a sluggish burn to the "Pury end." One son, Thomas, had
enlisted and was in Canada. Edmund Carey, the second, set up the loom
on which he wove the woollen cloth known as "tammy," in a two-storied
cottage. There his eldest child, WILLIAM, was born, and lived for six
years till his father was appointed schoolmaster, when the
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