Others of their friends were ready to help them. One of them, in the hearing of one of her children, said to her, “Now, Mrs. Hill, remember you are never to be in want of money to go to market with.” A strong feeling of independence led her, however, to rely on herself, on her husband, and her children. She had a hatred of debt, and in this hatred every one of her children came to share. “I early saw,” said Rowland, “the terrible inconvenience of being poor. My mother used to talk to me more than to all the others together of our difficulties, and they were very grievous. She used to burst into tears as she talked about them. One day she told me that she had not a shilling in the house, and she was afraid lest the postman might bring a letter while she had no money to pay the postage. She had always been careful to save the rags, which she kept in two bags—one for the white, and the other for the coloured. The white were worth three or four times more than the coloured. It occurred to her that she might sell them, though the bags were not full. I was always sent by her on such errands, and I got this time about three shillings for the rags.” She persuaded her husband to buy a ruling-machine, which she and Rowland chiefly worked. “That business is not at present well performed by anybody in Birmingham, and so it would be a likely thing for some of the lads to work at,” the father wrote to his brother-in-law. She turned the handle, while her little son, a child of nine, fed the machine. “It interfered largely with my education,” he said. In time he learnt to make the brass pens that were used in ruling, and so earned a little money for himself. They next took to making the copy-books, at first with the help of a bookbinder. But the help of this man the boy before long showed was not needed. “I soon acquired, in its simpler forms, the art of bookbinding—an art which I find I have not yet quite lost, having lately, in my seventy-first year, made up a scrap-book in what is called half-binding for the use of my grandchildren.” Johnson also had learnt in his youth how to bind a book, neither did he in advanced life forget the art. “It were better,” wrote Mrs. Thrale to him, “to bind books again, as you did one year in our thatched summer-house, than weigh out doses of mercury and opium which are not wanted.” There were other plans which Mrs. Hill formed, and carried out with unwearying industry, and in all of these her little son was always ready to take his share.