But they were writing about their own inventions and their own schemes; and, like all other inventors and schemers, they had a parental fondness for the offspring of their own brains. The rapid increase in the number of pupils was, moreover, as it always must be, a great source of danger to the discipline. In any school it is always a very hazardous time when the proportion of new boys is large. But in such a school as Hazelwood, with its complicated system of self-government, the hazard must have been unusually great. Out of 117 boys, with whom the school opened in January, 1825, only sixty-three had been in it more than seven months. At the very time, therefore, when Rowland Hill might with good reason have looked to enjoy some rest from his prolonged toil, a fresh strain was thrown upon him. It is not wonderful that he sank under it for a time, almost broken, as it seemed, in health and spirits. In the midst of his hard work, a few months before the second of the two illnesses, he had been suddenly called upon to face a new difficulty. He had been bent on founding a great school, which should serve as a kind of model to the whole country. “I had refrained from writing to you,” he wrote to his eldest brother, when he was regaining his strength, “because I knew it to be important to my speedy recovery to keep down as much as possible all those associations connected with the little school, and with the great school, which so uniformly arise in my mind whenever I write to you, let the subject be what it may.” Even so early as the year 1820 he had recorded in his Journal:— “All our plans are necessarily calculated for great numbers, and I contend that, where the strength of the teachers is proportionate, a school cannot be too numerous. If we had 500 instead of 70 boys, I would make this place a Paradise. Till we have some such number, the effects of our system, great as they have already been, cannot be justly appreciated. I have some hopes that in time we may be able to explode the foolish ideas that private education and limited numbers are desirable.”