Life of William Carey | Page 6

He

was the eldest of five children. He was the special care of their
grandmother, a woman of a delicate nature and devout habits, who
closed her sad widowhood in the weaver-son's cottage. Encompassed
by such a living influence the grandson spent his first six years.
Already the child unconsciously showed the eager thirst for knowledge,
and perseverance in attaining his object, which made him chiefly what
he became. His mother would often be awoke in the night by the
pleasant lisping of a voice "casting accompts; so intent was he from
childhood in the pursuit of knowledge. Whatever he began he finished;
difficulties never seemed to discourage his mind." On removal to the
ancestral schoolhouse the boy had a room to himself. His sister
describes it as full of insects stuck in every corner that he might
observe their progress. His many birds he entrusted to her care when he
was from home. In this picture we see the exact foreshadowing of the
man. "Though I often used to kill his birds by kindness, yet when he
saw my grief for it he always indulged me with the pleasure of serving
them again; and often took me over the dirtiest roads to get at a plant or
an insect. He never walked out, I think, when quite a boy, without
observation on the hedges as he passed; and when he took up a plant of
any kind he always observed it with care. Though I was but a child I
well remember his pursuits. He always seemed in earnest in his
recreations as well as in school. He was generally one of the most
active in all the amusements and recreations that boys in general pursue.
He was always beloved by the boys about his own age." To climb a
certain tree was the object of their ambition; he fell often in the attempt,
but did not rest till he had succeeded. His Uncle Peter was a gardener in
the same village, and gave him his first lessons in botany and
horticulture. He soon became responsible for his father's official garden,
till it was the best kept in the neighbourhood. Wherever after that he
lived, as boy or man, poor or in comfort, William Carey made and
perfected his garden, and always for others, until he created at
Serampore the botanical park which for more than half a century was
unique in Southern Asia.
We have in a letter from the Manse, Paulerspury, a tradition of the
impression made on the dull rustics by the dawning genius of the youth
whom they but dimly comprehended. He went amongst them under the

nickname of Columbus, and they would say, "Well, if you won't play,
preach us a sermon," which he would do. Mounting on an old dwarf
witch-elm about seven feet high, where several could sit, he would hold
forth. This seems to have been a resort of his for reading, his favourite
occupation. The same authority tells how, when suffering toothache, he
allowed his companions to drag the tooth from his head with a violent
jerk, by tying around it a string attached to a wheel used to grind malt,
to which they gave a sharp turn.
The boy's own peculiar room was a little library as well as museum of
natural history. He possessed a few books, which indeed were many for
those days, but he borrowed more from the whole country-side.
Recalling the eight years of his intellectual apprenticeship till he was
fourteen, from the serene height of his missionary standard, he wrote
long after:--"I chose to read books of science, history, voyages, etc.,
more than any others. Novels and plays always disgusted me, and I
avoided them as much as I did books of religion, and perhaps from the
same motive. I was better pleased with romances, and this circumstance
made me read the Pilgrim's Progress with eagerness, though to no
purpose." The new era, of which he was to be the aggressive spiritual
representative from Christendom, had not dawned. Walter Scott was
ten years his junior. Captain Cook had not discovered the Sandwich
Islands, and was only returning from the second of his three voyages
while Carey was still at school. The church services and the
watchfulness of his father supplied the directly moral training which his
grandmother had begun.
The Paulerspury living of St. James is a valuable rectory in the gift of
New College, Oxford. Originally built in Early English, and rebuilt in
1844, the church must have presented a still more venerable appearance
a century ago than it does now, with its noble tower in the
Perpendicular, and chancel in the Decorated style, dominating all the
county. Then, as still, effigies of a Paveli and his wife, and of Sir
Arthur Throckmorton and his