In order to earn his bread, he hired himself to a farmer, receiving for his labor nothing but his “victuals and clothes,” the latter being of the plainest and scantiest kind.  He worked very hard; but his employer was cold and indifferent to him at all times, and occasionally used him very badly.  The boy was naturally of a cheerful disposition, and it did him good service now in helping to sustain him in his hard lot.  Four years were passed in this way, and when he was fifteen years old his guardian informed him that he had now reached an age when he must begin his apprenticeship to some regular trade.

The boy was very anxious to learn clock-making, and begged his guardian to apprentice him to that trade; but the wise individual who controlled his affairs replied, sagely, that clock-making was a business in which he would starve, as it was already overdone in Connecticut.  There was one man, he said, engaged in that trade who had been silly enough to make two hundred clocks in one year, and he added that it would take the foolish man a life-time to sell them, or if they went off quickly, the market would be so glutted that no dealer would have need to increase his stock for years to come.  Clock-making, he informed the boy, had already reached the limit of its expansion in Connecticut, and offered no opportunities at all.  The carpenter’s trade, on the other hand, was never crowded with good workmen, and always offered the prospect of success to any enterprising and competent man.  It was the custom then to regard boys as little animals, possessed of a capacity for hard work, but without any reasoning powers of their own.  To the adage that “children should be seen and not heard,” the good people of that day added another clause, in effect, “and should never pretend to think for themselves.”  It was this profound conviction that induced parents and guardians, in so many instances, to disregard the wishes of the children committed to their care, and to condemn so many to lives for which they were utterly unfitted.  So it was with the guardian of Chauncey Jerome.  He listened to the boy’s expression of a preference, it is true, but paid no attention to it, and ended by apprenticing his ward to a carpenter.

The life of an apprentice is always hard, and in those days it was especially so.  No negro slave ever worked harder, and but few fared worse, so far as their bodily comfort was concerned, than the New England apprentices of the olden time.  Masters seemed almost to regard the lads indentured to them as their property, and in return for the support they gave them exacted from them the maximum amount of work they were capable of performing.  They granted them no privileges, allowed them no holidays, except those required by the law, and never permitted the slightest approach to laziness.  Chauncey Jerome’s master proved no exception to the rule, and when the boy exhibited an unusual proficiency and quickness in his trade, the only notice his employer took of