Poor Richard informs us that Necessity never makes a good bargain.  Mr. Goodyear was always a prey to necessity.  Nor was he ever a good man of business.  He was too entirely an inventor to know how to dispose of his inventions to advantage; and he could never feel that he had accomplished his mission with regard to India-rubber.  As soon as he had brought his shoemaking process to the point where other men could make it profitable, he withdrew from manufacturing, and sold rights to manufacture for the consideration of half a cent per pair.  Five cents had been reasonable enough, and would have given him ample means to continue his labors.  Half a cent kept him subject to necessity, which seemed to compel him to dispose of other rights at rates equally low.  Thus it happened that, when the whole India-rubber business of the country paid him tribute, or ought to have paid it, he remained an embarrassed man.  He had, too, the usual fate of inventors, in having to contend with the infringers of his rights,—­men who owed their all to his ingenuity and perseverance.  We may judge, however, of the rapidity with which the business grew, by the fact that, six years after the completion of his vulcanizing process, the holders of rights to manufacture shoes by that process deemed it worth while to employ Daniel Webster to plead their cause, and to stimulate his mind by a fee of twenty-five thousand dollars.  It is questionable if Charles Goodyear ever derived that amount from his patents, if we deduct from his receipts the money spent in further developing his discovery.  His ill-health obliged him to be abstemious, and he had no expensive tastes.  It was only in his laboratory that he was lavish, and there he was lavish indeed.  His friends still smiled at his zeal, or reproached him for it.  It has been only since the mighty growth of the business in his products that they have acknowledged that he was right and that they were wrong.  They remember him, sick, meagre, and yellow, now coming to them with a walking-stick of India-rubber, exulting in the new application of his material, and predicting its general use, while they objected that his stick had cost him fifty dollars; now running about among the comb factories, trying to get reluctant men to try their tools upon hard India-rubber, and producing at length a set of combs that cost twenty times the price of ivory ones; now shutting himself up for months, endeavoring to make a sail of India-rubber fabric, impervious to water, that should never freeze, and to which no sleet or ice should ever cling; now exhibiting a set of cutlery with India-rubber handles, or a picture set in an India-rubber frame, or a book with India-rubber covers, or a watch with an India-rubber case; now experimenting with India-rubber tiles for floors, which he hoped to make as brilliant in color as those of mineral, as agreeable to the tread as carpet, and as durable as an ancient floor of oak.  There is nothing in the history of invention more remarkable