when it was due, if my life was spared, and he finally consented to let me go.  When it came due I walked to Farmington, fifteen miles, paid him and walked back the same day, feeling relieved and happy.  I obtained the job of finishing the inside of a dwelling house, which gave me great encouragement.  The times were awful hard and but little business done at anything.  It would almost frighten a man to see a five dollar bill, they were so very scarce.  My work was about two miles from where I lived.  My wife was confined about this time with her first babe.  I would rise every morning two hours before day-light and prepare my breakfast, and taking my dinner in a little pail, bid my good wife good-by for the day, and start for my work, not returning till night.  About this time the Congregational Society employed a celebrated music teacher to conduct the church singing, and I having always had a desire to sing sacred music, joined his choir and would walk a long distance to attend the singing schools at night after working hard all day.  I was chosen chorister after a few weeks, which encouraged me very much in the way of singing, and was afterwards employed as a teacher to some extent, and for a long time led the singing there and at Bristol where I afterwards lived.  The next summer was the cold one of 1816, which none of the old people will ever forget, and which many of the young have heard a great deal about.  There was ice and snow in every month in the year.  I well remember on the seventh of June, while on my way to work, about a mile from home, dressed throughout with thick woolen clothes and an overcoat on, my hands got so cold that I was obliged to lay down my tools and put on a pair of mittens which I had in my pocket.  It snowed about an hour that day.  On the tenth of June, my wife brought in some clothes that had been spread on the ground the night before, which were frozen stiff as in winter.  On the fourth of July, I saw several men pitching quoits in the middle of the day with thick overcoats on, and the sun shining bright at the same time.  A body could not feel very patriotic in such weather.  I often saw men when hoeing corn, stop at the end of a row and get in the sun by a fence to warm themselves.  Not half enough corn ripened that year to furnish seed for the next.  I worked at my trade, and had the job of finishing the inside of a three-story house, having twenty-seven doors and a white oak matched floor to make, and did the whole for eighty-five dollars.  The same work could not now be done as I did it for less than five hundred dollars.  Such times as these were indeed hard for poor young men.  We did not have many carpets or costly furniture and servants; but as winter approached times seemed to grow harder and harder.  No work could be had.  I was in debt for my little house and lot which I had bought only a short time before, near the center of Plymouth, and had a payment to make on it the next spring.  I proposed going south to the city of