After a year or two at the vice and lathe, and other practical mechanical work, my father allowed me to employ myself in making working models of any of the too-numerous schemes which the vivid imagination of youth suggested. Among these, I well remember, was a machine for making bricks, which was one of the most successful of my early attempts, producing pretty little model bricks in white pipeclay. I always had access to molten type-metal, which I used for casting wheels, pulleys, and other parts of mechanical models where strength was not much required. Hence arose various devices for moulding different forms, a matter that caused me very little trouble, for by some intuitive instinct modelling came to me unsought and unstudied. Often during my evening walks round the fields, with a favourite dog, I would take a small lump of yellow clay from the roadside, and fashion it into some grotesque head or natural object, from which I would afterwards make a mould and cast it in type-metal.

In this quiet village life there was a break every two months, when the large melting-furnace was used to make type-metal, in which proceeding a great secret was involved. In spite of injunctions to the contrary, I would, by some means or other, find my way into the melting-house, where large masses of antimony were broken up to form the alloy with lead. The dust arising from the powdered antimony, on more that one occasion, caused me severe sickness, and betrayed my clandestine visits to the melting-house, where I discovered that the addition of tin and copper, in small quantities, to the ordinary alloy, was the secret by which my father's type lasted so much longer than that produced by other typefounders.

There was, however, one other attraction in the village, which played a not-unimportant part in moulding my ideas at this very early period. I was very fond of machinery, and of watching it when in motion; and if ever I was absent from meals, I could probably have been found at the flour mill at the other end of the village, where I passed many hours, gazing with pleasure upon the broad sheet of water falling into the ever-receding buckets of the great overshot water-wheel; or, perhaps, I might have been watching, with a feeling almost of awe, the huge wooden spur-wheel which brought up the speed, and was one of the wonders of the millwright's craft in those days. Its massive oak shaft and polished horn-beam cogs have long since passed away, and yielded to their successor, cast iron, which in its turn is now being rapidly replaced by the stronger metal, steel, thus keeping up that ever-changing cycle of advancement in the arts which is carrying us forward to discoveries that may change every phase of civilised life, if the exhaustion of our coal does not land us again into a state of barbarism.

I had now arrived at my seventeenth year, and had attained my full height, a fraction over six feet. I was well endowed with youthful energy, and was of an extremely sanguine temperament. At this period of life all things seem possible if you have once made up your mind to conquer, and not to allow any temporary disappointments to weaken your resolution. The opportunity to put this beautiful theory to the proof was about to be afforded to me, for my father had resolved to remove his business to London, when I should have to change my solitary country life, which had so many irresistible charms, for a totally different one. I should see for the first time the great metropolis, about which I had heard so much but knew so little.

On March 4th, 1830, I arrived in London, where a new world seemed opened to me. I was overwhelmed with wonder and astonishment; all the ideal scenes in the "Arabian Nights," which had held me spellbound in my native village, were as nothing to the ceaseless panorama which London presented, with its thousands of vehicles and pedestrians, its gorgeous shops and stately buildings, and its endless miles of streets and numerous squares. I was never tired of walking about, for every turn presented some new object to rivet my attention; and in this way I passed my first week's residence in London. I usually returned home in the evening, greatly tired and worn out, only to go forth on the morrow to make new explorations and again lose myself in those endless labyrinths of streets; and yet, with all the delight inspired by the novelty of the scene, there was one thing strange to me, and sadly wanting. I felt that I was alone; no one knew me. I never met, in all this excited rush, one human countenance that I could recognise, or a friendly face to smile and give a passing salutation as in my old home: where the little children on their way to school would drop a curtsy and leave me the best side of the path, while the farm-labourer at his cottage door would give me Good morning, Master Henry!"