Many duties he undertook, he said, as it was less trouble for him to do them himself than to be called in to help another. His father did not keep his accounts on any good system—he had not even an index to his ledger—nor did he make them out at any fixed time. To him they were a necessary evil, and were treated accordingly. The bills were never sent out till the very end of the holidays. “I had a great liking for working in the carpenter’s shop. All through my holidays I was in constant dread lest my father should come up to ask me to help him in making out the accounts, and so call me off from some piece of construction. At last I said that I would rather make up the accounts myself, as I got so tired of these constant interruptions. One of my cousins helped me. He and I used to rise very early one morning just before the holidays, and at last we always completed the posting from the ledger, which before had been spread over the whole holidays, by breakfast-time, while the accounts were sent off with the boys.” Rowland was about fourteen when he thus began to make up the school-bills. At the age of sixteen or seventeen he took into his own hands the entire management of his father’s money affairs, and “a heavy responsibility it was.” There were not a few debts owing, but in no long time, by dint of great efforts, he paid off all that was due. “I went round and discharged all the debts, and was very much complimented by my father’s creditors.” About the same time the two brothers were planning to have a kind of “Speech Day”—an Exhibition, as they called it. “We are busily employed,” wrote Rowland in his Journal, in the year 1813, “in preparing for an Exhibition at Christmas of oratory, penmanship, arithmetic, parsing, &c.” In the dramatic part of the entertainment the boys were chiefly drilled by Matthew. The rest of the work mainly fell on Rowland. Three years later his brother was away in London, “eating his terms,” and his father had fallen sick. “I had to drill,” he said, “the boys in recitation. I disliked the work very much, and was very unfit for it; but I had to do it. We always printed the pieces the boys were to repeat. In the scene from ‘Hamlet,’ where Horatio says, ‘My lord, I think I saw him yesternight!’ and Hamlet answers, ‘Saw?—who?’ I thought ‘who’ ought to be ‘whom.’ I consulted my father, who agreed with me; and so we printed it. Matthew—[the old man, as he came to this part of the story, laughed heartily]—Matthew was very angry with me for thus correcting Shakespeare.” He has made in his Journal the following record of the Exhibition of this year:—