SECTION I.

Education and Miscellaneous Employment, chiefly at Home.

In the extreme northern part of North Lancashire is the market-town of Ulverstone, and not far from it the obscure village of Dragleybeck, in which a small cottage gave me birth on the 19th June, 1764; being the only child of Roger and Mary Barrow. The said cottage had been in my mother's family nearly two hundred years, and had descended to her aunt, who lived in it to the age of eighty, and in it my mother died at the advanced age of ninety.

To the cottage were attached three or four small fields, sufficient for the keep of as many cows, which supplied our family with milk and butter, besides reserving a portion of land for a crop of oats. There was also a paddock behind the cottage, called the hempland, expressive of the use to which it had at one time been applied, but now converted to the cultivation of potatoes, peas, beans, and other culinary vegetables; which, with the grain, fell to the labour of my father, who, with several brothers, the sons of an extensive farmer, was brought up to that business in the neighbourhood of the Lakes; and three or four of the sons held large farms under the Devonshire family—Cavendish and Burlington.

At the bottom of the hemp-land runs the beck or brook, a clear stream that gives the name to the village, and abounds with trout.

Contiguous to the cottage was also a small flowergarden, which, in due time, fell to my share; that is, while yet a young boy I had full charge of keeping up a supply of the ordinary flowers of the season.