He always looked back with humiliation to the inexperienced performances of his untried zeal at that time of life; but he was doing his best to study, working hard at grammar, and every morning reading his portion of the Scripture for the day in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, as well as English.
Well might Mr.Scott say, as he looked at the little cobbler's shop, "That was Mr.Carey's college;" for all this time he was working at his trade, and, on his master's death, took the business, and married the daughter of the house before he was twenty.
It was an unlucky marriage, for she was a dull, ignorant woman, with no feeling for her husband's high aims or superior powers, and the business was not a flourishing one; but he never manifested anything but warm affection and tenderness towards this very uncompanionable person, and perhaps, like most men of low station and unusual intellect, had no idea that more could be expected of a wife.
Perhaps, in spite of his kindness, Mrs.Carey had to endure the disasters common to the wives of struggling great men: for William Carey's shoes were not equal to his sermons, and his congregation were too poor even to raise means to clothe him decently.

His time was spent in long tramps to sell shoes he had made and to obtain the mending of others, and, meantime, he was constantly suffering from fever and ague.
In 1786, when in his twenty-fifth year, he obtained a little Baptist chapel and the goodwill of a school at Moulton; but as a minister he only received 16_l._ per annum, and at the same time proved, as many have done before him, that aptness to learn does not imply aptness to teach.

He could not keep order, and his boys first played tricks with him and then deserted, till he came nearly to starvation, and had to return to his last and his leather.
Yet it was the geography lessons of this poor little school that first found the way to the true chord of Carey's soul.

Those broad tracts of heathenism that struck his eye in the map, and the summary of nations and numbers professing false religions, were to a mind like his no mere items of information to be driven into dull brains, but were terrible realities representing souls perishing for lack of knowledge.

Cook's Voyages fell into his hands and fed the growing impulse.