The blow that he had received was at all events so severe that his marriage had to be put off for a fortnight. For three or four years the young couple lived at Birmingham.[17] They then removed to Kidderminster, where Rowland was born in the freehold house that had belonged to three generations of his family.[18] It was not, however, to remain long in his father’s hands. The French war ruined the manufacture in which he had engaged, and in the great straits to which he was before long reduced, he was able to retain nothing of his small inheritance. He left Kidderminster, and removed to Wolverhampton, where he found employment. His salary however was so small that it was only by means of the severest thrift that he managed to keep his head above water. It was in the stern school of poverty that Rowland was brought up from his earliest years. Like Garrick, he was “bred in a family whose study was to make four pence do as much as others made four pence half-penny do.” [Illustration: THE BIRTH-PLACE OF SIR ROWLAND HILL, KIDDERMINSTER.] His father had taken an old farm-house, called Horsehills, that stood about a mile from Wolverhampton. It had long been empty, and the rent was so low that at first it excited his suspicions. It was not till he had signed the lease that he was informed that the house was haunted. He cared much about a low rent, and nothing about ghosts. On such terms he would have been only too glad to find a haunted house each time he changed his place of abode. He lived here till Rowland was seven years old. When the child had become a man of eighty he put on record many of the memories that he still retained of this home of his early days. Here it was that they were living during the terrible dearth of 1800, of which for many a year, men, he says, could hardly talk without a shudder. He could remember how one day during this famine when they were dining on bread and butter and lettuce, a beggar came to the door. His mother took from the dish one of the slices and sent it to the man. He refused it because there was not butter enough for him. The half-starved people took to plundering the fields of the potatoes, and the owners, in order to secure them, set about to dig them up and store them. Late rains, moreover, had followed the hot weather, and the roots had begun to sprout. Rowland writes, “I remember that when our crop of late potatoes was dug up, we children were set to spread them over the floor of the only room that could be spared. It was one of the parlours.” Likely enough they were thus brought into the house as a safer place against the rioters than any outhouse. Bread riots broke out. Most of the judges declaimed on the winter circuits against the forestallers. “A violent clamour was excited against corn-dealers and farmers, which being joined in by the mob, artificial scarcity became the cry. Farmers were threatened, and their barns and ricks in many places were set on