So he settled to his work with Charles Nickolls of Hackleton at the age of fourteen, with no prospect but that of being bound to wield the awl and bend over the last until he had come to be twenty-one years of age. Soon after entering the shoemaker's room he found a copy of the New Testament, in the notes to which occurred a number of Greek words. This opened up another field of study, and he determined to enter upon it. Copying out the words, he took them for explanation to a young man who was a weaver in the village where his father lived. This weaver came from Kidderminster, had seen better days, and had received a good education. He assisted young Carey, then fifteen years of age, in mastering the rudiments of Greek. With such a start he did not rest until he had procured and could read the Greek New Testament. In the second year of his apprenticeship his indentures were cancelled on account of the death of his master, and Carey became a journeyman, of course at very low wages, under Mr. Old. At this time there lived in the neighborhood a clergyman who was one of the lights of a dark period in the religious history of this country--the Rev. Thomas Scott, the popular evangelical preacher, writer, and Bible commentator. His own career was very remarkable. From the position of a laboring man he had risen to occupy good rank as a clergyman, and with very meagre advantages in early life he had become, or was rapidly becoming, one of the best sacred classics in the country. The man who had laid aside the shepherd's smock for the clergyman's surplice, and who on one occasion doffed his clerical attire, donned the shepherd's clothes again, and sheared eleven large sheep on an afternoon, was not likely to neglect or overlook a youth of more than ordinary intelligence and application to study because the youth happened to spend his days at the shoemaker's stall. Mr. Scott on his visiting rounds now and then turned in at Mr. Old's, and was struck with the boy's bright look and rapt attention to any remarks that the visitor might make. Occasionally young Carey would venture to ask a question. So appropriate and far-seeing were his inquiries that Mr. Scott discerned his young friend's uncommon powers, and often declared that he would prove to be "no ordinary character." In later years, when William Carey was known throughout England as a pioneer in mission work, as a great Oriental linguist, and the first translator of the New Testament into Bengali, Mr. Scott, as he passed by the old room where the thoughtful and studious young shoemaker had once sat at work, would point to it and say, "That was Mr. Carey's college."