He was only there a year, but it was an eventful one in William Pearson's life. He made the acquaintance of Benjamin Gough, the blind botanist, and it is possible that he was led by him into enquiry not only into the wonders of plant life, but of the life of that most delicate of all plants, the religious faith of the human soul. It is certain that during this year William Pearson's chief {122} study was the study of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Church Doctrine, and the end of it was that he reasoned and read himself out of Episcopalianism into Unitarianism, as his father had in the past done before him. He found rest to his young soul in the thought of the great Fatherhood of God, and worshipped in the old Presbyterian Meeting House, where sometimes in after years Wordsworth also worshipped, and near by which lie the ashes of the James Patrick of Kendal, who was the original of the Wanderer in _The Prelude_. It may be fancy, but I like to think that it was in that chapel that the young lad first saw the man whose writings did more for him all through life than any other--I mean William Wordsworth. From Kendal, William went, as was the wont of many a Kendal apprentice, to a grocer's shop in London, and at the end of three months he returned to the Winster Vale, broken in health from the stifle of London air, and the fact that he had no better resting place after long days of work in a city store than a shake-down underneath the counter. He was now in his twenty-third year. The 'poddish' and fresh air of the {123} Yews set him 'agate' again, and he determined to try Manchester life, and on the 16th March, 1803, he set out for that metropolis of the North. He obtained a situation on the next day after his arrival as clerk in the bank of James Fox & Company, in King Street, and for the next seventeen years he endured 'The fierce confederate storm Of sorrow barricadoed evermore Within the walls of cities.' How simple and frugal his life was there, we may gather from the fact that out of his first year's stipend of £75 he sent back a deposit to one of the Kendal banks. He was not very happy. He wanted friends of his age 'who united,' as he tells us, 'those first of blessings, virtue and knowledge,' and they were not. 'Indeed, sir,' he writes to James Watson of Kendal, 'I think Manchester, in proportion to its population, very deficient in men of cultivated understanding. Immersed in business, or carried down the stream of dissipation, slaves to "Mammon" and to "Bacchus," they have seldom time for the rational amusement of reading or for the calm pleasure of reflection.' {124}