bread oven, and steam it over the spout of her tea-kettle, and to press the kitchen fire into his service as far as it would go.  When this failed, he would go to the shops in the vicinity of Woburn, and beg to be allowed to use the ovens and boilers after working hours were over.  The workmen regarded him as a lunatic, but were too good-natured to deny him the request.  Finally, he induced a bricklayer to make him an oven, and paid him in mason’s aprons of India-rubber.  The oven was a failure.  Sometimes it would turn out pieces of perfectly vulcanized cloth, and again the goods would be charred and ruined.  Goodyear was in despair.

All this time he lived on the charity of his friends.  His neighbors pretended to lend him money, but in reality gave him the means of keeping his family from starvation.  He has declared that all the while he felt sure he would, before long, be able to pay them back, but they declared with equal emphasis that, at that time, they never expected to witness his success.  He was yellow and shriveled in face, with a gaunt, lean figure, and his habit of wearing an India-rubber coat, which was charred and blackened from his frequent experiments with it, gave him a wild and singular appearance.  People shook their heads solemnly when they saw him, and said that the mad-house was the proper place for him.

The winter of 1839-40 was long and severe.  At the opening of the season, Mr. Goodyear received a letter from a house in Paris, making him a handsome offer for the use of his process of curing India-rubber with aqua fortis.  Here was a chance for him to rise out of his misery.  A year before he would have closed with the offer, but since then he had discovered the effects of sulphur and heat on his compound, and had passed far beyond the aqua fortis stage.  Disappointment and want had not warped his honesty, and he at once declined to enter into any arrangements with the French house, informing them that although the process they desired to purchase was a valuable one, it was about to be entirely replaced by another which he was then on the point of perfecting, and which he would gladly sell them as soon as he had completed it.  His friends declared that he was mad to refuse such an offer; but he replied that nothing would induce him to sell a process which he knew was about to be rendered worthless by still greater discoveries.

A few weeks later, a terrible snow-storm passed over the land, one of the worst that New England has ever known, and in the midst of it Goodyear made the appalling discovery that he had not a particle of fuel or a mouthful of food in the house.  He was ill enough to be in bed himself, and his purse was entirely empty.  It was a terrible position, made worse, too, by the fact that his friends who had formerly aided him had turned from him, vexed with his pertinacity, and abandoned him to his fate.  In his despair, he bethought him of a mere acquaintance who lived several miles