Although then large towns and places near the sea were marching on with the progress of civilisation, little country places buried inland were shunted into a siding, as it were, and so were left far behind the great world. In this way the midland counties of England were a long time emerging from the darkness of the Middle Ages. Staffordshire, the county of pottery, lagged a long way behind in improvements. Its villages were straggling and dirty. Its houses little better than thatched hovels or mud huts. Heaps of waste and dirt and rubbish blocked their doorways. Broken ware was scattered everywhere. Hollows in the ground, where clay had been scooped out to make ware, gaped close to the doorways, and collected great pools of evil-smelling stagnant water. Burslem was in something of this sorry state when Josiah Wedgwood opened his eyes on the world. The people of the village for the most part had been potters for upwards of 200 years. That is, they made pots and butter-dishes and porringers--for spoons and plates were still of wood--out of the clay of which their soil was made; not fine and polished and gleaming white, as we know them to-day, but rough-hewn things, for the trade of pottery was yet in its infancy. A potter's work could be divided among one family. The father and sons made and fired the dishes. The mother and daughters strapped them on the backs of horses and donkeys, driving them along roads so wretched that the poor beasts often stuck in the mud or fell down in the ruts, while the women, with pipes in their mouths and rough words on their lips, urged them on with whip and lash. It was this sort of life that lay before Josiah. But he had been born with a boy's best blessing--a good mother--a woman who had a heart large enough for thirteen children, and who tried what she could to hand down to them by example a birthright better than riches--to make them patient, industrious, dependent on self. When the child was little more than a baby, and able only to toddle with uncertain step, he was sent to a dame's school, quite as much to be out of the way as to learn his A B C. For the rest he played about the door of the cottage, his greatest treat to bestride the pack-horse's back, hoisted up by some good-natured packman. When he was seven years old he was sent to school to a place called Newcastle-under-Lyme, some three and a half miles across the fields. In long days of sunshine the walk was full of pleasure to the boy, as he came to know Nature's beauties--her birds and flowers and sweet fragrances--as we best can know things, by close and loving intimacy. Long years afterwards, when he had reached the highest heights of his trade, it was the unforgotten faces of the wild flowers lurking in the fields between Newcastle and Burslem that rose before his mind's eye as he decorated his china services with coloured leaves and flowers.