“In addition to the carpet making,” she says in the Manuscript Memoir of her life, “we carried on the manufacture of shalloons and plainbacks, the whole of which I managed myself, so far as putting out the warps and weft, and taking in from the weavers.  We had at one time as many as a hundred and sixty hand weavers on these goods.  We sold the principal part of them in London.  We had also about four looms making brace webs and body belts.  The produce of these looms I sold principally to the Irish, who made them up into braces and hawked them about the country.  I also made and stitched, with assistance, all the carpets that we sold retail.  I used to get up to work by four o’clock in the morning, and being very diligent, I have usually earned two shillings before breakfast, by the time that my neighbours were coming downstairs.”

The partnership of Crossley, Travers, and Crossley, lasted for twenty years.  When the term had expired, the partners shared their savings; they amounted to L4,200, or fourteen hundred pounds to each.  This was not a very large sum to make during twenty years’ hard work; but Dean Clough Mill was then but a small concern, and each partner did his own share of handiwork in spinning, dyeing, and weaving.  Mrs. Crossley says that “the fourteen hundred pounds came in very useful.”  In fact, it was only a beginning.  John Crossley eventually bought the Dean Clough Mills out and out.  He had a family of eight children to provide for; and he put his sons for the most part into his business.  They followed the example of their parents, and became thrifty, useful, and honourable men.

John Crossley, the founder of the firm, has observed, that in the course of his life he was a keen observer of men and things.  He says he noticed many of the failures of his neighbours in bringing up their children.  Some fathers were so strict with their children, keeping them so constantly at home, and letting them see so little of the world in which they lived, that when the fathers died and the children were removed from all restraint, they came forth into the world like calves, and found everything entirely different from what they expected.  Such unguided young persons, Mr. Crossley found, soon became wild, lost, and ruined.  Then he observed the opposite extreme,—­where the fathers indulged their children so much, that they became quite unfitted to endure the hardships of the world,—­and, like a vessel that is sent to sea without a helm, they soon became stranded on the shores of life.

Hence Mr. Crossley endeavoured to steer clear of both extremes, and to give to his sons as much knowledge and experience of life as possible.  When at home, he always had one of his sons near him; or when he went from home, he always took one of them with him.  Thus they gained a great deal of practical knowledge of life, and knew something of the good and evil in the world; and as they grew older, they were all the better able to turn their own lives to the best account.