ng two hours before day-light and prepare my breakfast, and
taking my dinner in a little pail, bid my good wife good-by for the day,
and start for my work, not returning till night. About this time the
Congregational Society employed a celebrated music teacher to conduct
the church singing, and I having always had a desire to sing sacred
music, joined his choir and would walk a long distance to attend the
singing schools at night after working hard all day. I was chosen
chorister after a few weeks, which encouraged me very much in the way of
singing, and was afterwards employed as a teacher to some extent, and
for a long time led the singing there and at Bristol where I afterwards
lived. The next summer was the cold one of 1816, which none of the old
people will ever forget, and which many of the young have heard a great
deal about. There was ice and snow in every month in the year. I well
remember on the seventh of June, while on my way to work, about a mile
from home, dressed throughout with thick woolen clothes and an overcoat
on, my hands got so cold that I was obliged to lay down my tools and put
on a pair of mittens which I had in my pocket. It snowed about an hour
that day. On the tenth of June, my wife brought in some clothes that had
been spread on the ground the night before, which were frozen stiff as
in winter. On the fourth of July, I saw several men pitching quoits in
the middle of the day with thick overcoats on, and the sun shining
bright at the same time. A body could not feel very patriotic in such
weather. I often saw men when hoeing corn, stop at the end of a row and
get in the sun by a fence to warm themselves. Not half enough corn
ripened that year to furnish seed for the next. I worked at my trade,
and had the job of finishing the inside of a three-story house, having
twenty-seven doors and a white oak matched floor to make, and did the
whole for eighty-five dollars. The same work could not now be done as I
did it for less than five hundred dollars. Such times as these were
indeed hard for poor young men. We did not have many carpets or costly
furniture and servants; but as winter approached times seemed to grow
harder and harder. No work could be had. I was in debt for my little
house and lot which I had bought only a short time before, near the
center of Plymouth, and had a payment to make on it the next spring. I
proposed going south to the city of Baltimore, to obtain work, and had
already made