It is a testimony to the toughness of child nature, though none to the management of this brutal institution, that of Stanley’s thirty school-fellows one lived to be a wealthy merchant, another to be a clergyman, a third to be a colonial lawyer, and a fourth to become a man of large fortune overseas. But the iron entered deeply into young Rowlands’ soul, and the most constant motive in his life was to obliterate the stigma of pauperism. His connection with the workhouse abruptly terminated when he was about fifteen. He turned on the brutal master, gave him a severe thrashing, ran away, got first a place as a pupil teacher, then worked as a farm-boy, a haberdasher’s boy, and a butcher’s boy, until at last, at Liverpool, he obtained a job on an American sailing-ship. At New Orleans, tired of the brutality he had experienced in a voyage of eighty-three days, he ran away from the ship, and the same day chanced across the man who was to become his adopted father, a Mr. Stanley, who, once some sort of minister, was now a commercial traveller. No more striking tribute has ever been paid to the influence of American institutions than that of the ex-workhouse lad from England. “The people I passed,” he says, “appeared to me nobler than any I had seen. They had a swing of the body wholly un-English, and their facial expressions differed from those I had been accustomed to. I strove to give a name to what was so unusual. Now, of course, I know that it was the sense of equality and independence that made each face so different from what I had seen in Liverpool. These people knew no master, and had no more awe of their employers than they had of their fellow-employees.” At the same time he could not help feeling “a little contempt” for the extreme touchiness which was the defect of these high qualities. In a few weeks he had himself acquired a good deal of the American spirit; the servile taint was eradicated; and the temper and aptitudes which had been so long suppressed expanded in the “felicities of freedom.”