On another occasion, when he was in the most urgent need of materials, he looked about his house to see if there was left one relic of better days upon which a little money could be borrowed.  There was nothing except his children’s school-books,—­the last things from which a New-Englander is willing to part.  There was no other resource.  He gathered them up and sold them for five dollars, with which he laid in a fresh stock of gum and sulphur, and kept on experimenting.

Seeing no prospect of success in Massachusetts, he now resolved to make a desperate effort to get to New York, feeling confident that the specimens he could take with him would convince some one of the superiority of his new method.  He was beginning to understand the causes of his many failures, but he saw clearly that his compound could not be worked with certainty without expensive apparatus.  It was a very delicate operation, requiring exactness and promptitude.  The conditions upon which success depended were numerous, and the failure of one spoiled all.  To vulcanize India-rubber is about as difficult as to make perfect bread; but the art of bread-making was the growth of ages, and Charles Goodyear was only ten years and a half in perfecting his process.  Thousands of ingenious men and women, aided by many happy accidents, must have contributed to the successive invention of bread; but he was only one man, poor and sick.  It cost him thousands of failures to learn that a little acid in his sulphur caused the blistering; that his compound must be heated almost immediately after being mixed, or it would never vulcanize; that a portion of white lead in the compound greatly facilitated the operation and improved the result; and when he had learned these facts, it still required costly and laborious experiments to devise the best methods of compounding his ingredients, the best proportions, the best mode of heating, the proper duration of the heating, and the various useful effects that could be produced by varying the proportions and the degree of heat.  He tells us that many times, when, by exhausting every resource, he had prepared a quantity of his compound for heating, it was spoiled because he could not, with his inadequate apparatus, apply the heat soon enough.

To New York, then, he directed his thoughts.  Merely to get there cost him a severer and a longer effort than men in general are capable of making.  First he walked to Boston, ten miles distant, where he hoped to be able to borrow from an old acquaintance fifty dollars, with which to provide for his family and pay his fare to New York.  He not only failed in this, but he was arrested for debt and thrown into prison.  Even in prison, while his father was negotiating to secure his release, he labored to interest men of capital in his discovery, and made proposals for founding a factory in Boston.  Having obtained his liberty, he went to a hotel, and spent a week in vain efforts to effect a small loan.  Saturday