uld kill me, and the
frightful notes of the whippoorwill made my hair stand on end. The dogs
were after me at every house I passed. I have never forgotten that
night. The boys of to-day do not see such times as I did.

The next year, 1810, my boss took a job in Ellsworth Society, Litchfield
County. I footed it to and from that place several times in the course
of the year, with a load of joiners' tools on my back. What would a boy
17 years old now think to travel thirty miles in a hot summer's day,
with a heavy load of joiners' tools on his back? But that was about the
only way that we could get around in those days. At that time there were
not half a dozen one-horse wagons in the whole town. At that place I
attended the church of Rev. Daniel Parker, father of Hon. Amasa J.
Parker, of Albany, who was then a little boy four or five years old. I
often saw him at meeting with his mother. He is a first cousin of F.S. &
J. Parker of this city, two highly respectable men engaged in the paper
business.

In the fall of 1811, I made a bargain with the man that I was bound to,
that if he would give me four months in the winter of each year when the
business was dull, I would clothe myself. I therefore went to Waterbury,
and hired myself to Lewis Stebbins, (a singing master of that place,) to
work at making the dials for the old fashioned long clock. This kind of
business gave me great satisfaction, for I always had a desire to work
at clocks. In 1807, when I was fourteen years old, I proposed to my
guardian to get me a place with Mr. Eli Terry, of Plymouth, to work at
them. Mr. Terry was at that time making more clocks than any other man
in the country, about two hundred in a year, which was thought to be a
great number.

My guardian, a good old man, told me that there was so many clocks then
making, that the country would soon be filled with them, and the
business would be good for nothing in two or three years. This opinion
of that wise man made me feel very sad. I well remember, when I was
about twelve years old, what I heard some old gentleman say, at a
training, (all of the good folks in those days were as sure to go to
training as to attend church,) they were talking about Mr. Terry; the
foolish man they said, had begun to make two hundred clocks; one said,
he never would live long enough to finish them; another remarked, that
if he did he never would, nor could possibly sell so many, and ridiculed
the very idea.

I wa