ly and late at his garden, but ague, caused by
a neighbouring marsh, returned and left him so bald that he wore a wig
thereafter until his voyage to India. During his preaching for more
than three years at Barton, which involved a walk of sixteen miles, he
did not receive from the poor folks enough to pay for the clothes he
wore out in their service. His younger brother delicately came to his
help, and he received the gift with a pathetic tenderness. But a
calling which at once starved him, in spite of all his method and
perseverance, and cramped the ardour of his soul for service to the
Master who had revealed Himself in him, became distasteful. He gladly
accepted an invitation from the somewhat disorganised church at Moulton
to preach to them. They could offer him only about L10 a year,
supplemented by L5 from a London fund. But the schoolmaster had just
left, and Carey saw in that fact a new hope. For a time he and his
family managed to live on an income which is estimated as never
exceeding L36 a year. We find this passage in a printed appeal made by
the "very poor congregation" for funds to repair and enlarge the chapel
to which the new pastor's preaching had attracted a crowd:--"The
peculiar situation of our minister, Mr. Carey, renders it impossible
for us to send him far abroad to collect the Contributions of the
Charitable; as we are able to raise him but about Ten Pounds per Annum,
so that he is obliged to keep a School for his Support: And as there
are other two Schools in the Town, if he was to leave Home to collect
for the Building, he must probably quit his Station on his Return, for
Want of a Maintenance."

His genial loving-kindness and his fast increasing learning little
fitted him to drill peasant children in the alphabet. "When I kept
school the boys kept me," he used to confess with a merry twinkle. In
all that our Lord meant by it William Carey was a child from first to
last. The former teacher returned, and the poor preacher again took to
shoemaking for the village clowns and the shops in Kettering and
Northampton. His house still stands, one of a row of six cottages of
the dear old English type, with the indispensable garden behind, and
the glad sunshine pouring in through the open window embowered in roses
and honeysuckle.

There, and chiefly in the school-hours as he tried to teach the
children geography and the Bible and was all the while teaching
himself, the missionary idea arose