but he could not turn back.  The goal was almost in sight, and he felt that he would be false to his mission were he to abandon his labors now.  To the world he seemed a crack-brained dreamer, and some there were who, seeing the distress of his family, did not hesitate to apply still harsher names to him; but to the Great Eye that reads all hearts, how different did this man appear!  It saw the anguish that wrung the heart of Charles Goodyear, and knew the more than heroic firmness with which, in the midst of his poverty and suffering, he agonized for the great discovery.  Had it been merely wealth that he was working for, doubtless he would have turned back and sought some other means of obtaining it; but he sought more.  He was striving for the good of his fellow-men, and ambitious of becoming a benefactor of the race.  He felt that he had a mission to fulfill, and no one else could perform it.

He was right.  A still greater success was about to crown his labors, but in a manner far different from his expectations.  His experiments had developed nothing; chance was to make the revelation.  It was in the spring of 1839 that this revelation came to him, and in the following manner:  Standing before a stove in a store at Woburn, Massachusetts, he was explaining to some acquaintances the properties of a piece of sulphur-cured India-rubber which he held in his hand.  They listened to him good-naturedly, but with evident incredulity, when suddenly he dropped the rubber on the stove, which was red hot.  His old cloths would have melted instantly from contact with such heat; but, to his surprise, this piece underwent no such change.  In amazement, he examined it, and found that while it had charred or shriveled, like leather, it had not softened at all.  The bystanders attached no importance to this phenomenon, but to him it was a revelation.  He renewed his experiments with enthusiasm, and in a little while established the facts that India-rubber, when mixed with sulphur and exposed to a certain degree of heat for a certain time, would not melt or even soften at any degree of heat, that it would only char at two hundred and eighty degrees, and that it would not stiffen from exposure to any degree of cold.  The difficulty now consisted in finding out the exact degree of heat necessary for the perfection of the rubber, and the exact length of time required for the heating.

He made this discovery in his darkest days; when, in fact, he was in constant danger of arrest for debt, having already been a frequent inmate of the debtor’s prison.  He was in the depths of bitter poverty, and in such feeble health that he was constantly haunted by the fear of dying before he had perfected his discovery—­before he had fulfilled his mission.  His poverty was a greater drawback to him than ever before.  He needed an apparatus for producing a high and uniform heat for his experiments, and he was unable to obtain it.  He used to bake his compound in his wife’s