So, too, when I first knew him, and for a long time after, he was incapable of making a speech.  Even a few sentences were too much for him; and though he argued at least one case to the court, while in business at Newburyport, I am persuaded, from what I afterward knew of him, that he must have done what he did by jerks, or have committed the whole to memory.  And this, strange as it may now appear to those who knew him only as a lecturer and platform-speaker, continued long after he had entered upon the ministry; but of this more hereafter.  Even his prayers were written out, and learned by heart, years after he took charge of the Hollis Street Church, though I dare say it was not known by his people.  Perhaps, too, I may as well say here, lest I may forget to say it hereafter, that, at the time I speak of, he was neither a phrenologist, nor a spiritualist, nor a conscientious believer in witchcraft, or rather in the phenomena that used to be called witchcraft, in the days of Cotton Mather.

Soon after the beginning of our acquaintance, Mr. Joseph L. Lord, the brother of his first wife,—­and he too has just passed away,—­seeing what the prospect was for the brother-in-law he was so proud of, persuaded him to abandon the law at once, and forever, and go into the jobbing and retail dry-goods business with him, on the corner of Court and Marlborough, now Washington Street.  He had no capital, to be sure, but then he wrote a beautiful hand, was very methodical, and had made himself acquainted with bookkeeping, after the Italian method, from Rees’s Cyclopaedia.  I took the chamber which Mr. Pierpont left, and went into the jobbing business also, with a capital of between two and three hundred—­dollars, and a credit amounting to perhaps five hundred more, which enterprise terminated after a few months, not in my failure, but in my taking a trip to New York with a large quantity of smuggled goods, belonging to Messrs. Pierpont and Lord, where I disposed of them to such advantage, that, on my return, I was persuaded to go into the retail haberdashery line, at 103 Court Street, next door to Pierpont and Lord, and just underneath the chamber, not chambers, which I had occupied at first with my wholesale establishment.  I had for a partner, at first, Erastus, a brother of “Joe’s,” whom I had known as a bookbinder in Portland two or three years before.  He was now manufacturing pocket-books, and appeared to be doing, not only a large and profitable, but safe business,—­selling for cash, running a horse and gig, and paying the bills of all the “dear five hundred friends” who rode with him.

Our copartnership did not last long.  His brother “Joe,” being a shrewd man of business, of uncommon foresight and comprehensiveness, though rather adventurous, gave me a hint, and soon provided me with another partner, a graduate of Cambridge, named Fisher, with whom I was associated a few months longer.  Then came the peace of 1815, which threw the whole country into a paroxysm of joy, unsettling business everywhere, at home and abroad, and setting people together by the ears upon all the great questions of the day.