emitting an odor so offensive that they had been obliged to
bury it. New ingredients had been employed, new machinery applied, but
still the articles would dissolve. In some cases, shoes had borne the
heat of one summer, and melted the next. The wagon-covers became
sticky in the sun, and rigid in the cold. The directors were at their
wits' end;--since it required two years to test a new process, and
meanwhile they knew not whether the articles made by it were valuable
or worthless. If they stopped manufacturing, that was certain ruin. If
they went on, they might find the product of a whole winter dissolving
on their hands. The capital of the Company was already so far
exhausted, that, unless the true method were speedily discovered, it
would be compelled to wind up its affairs. The agent urged Mr.
Goodyear not to waste time upon minor improvements, but to direct all
his efforts to finding out the secret of successfully working the
material itself. The Company could not buy his improved inflator; but
let him learn how to make an India-rubber that would stand the
summer's heat, and there was scarcely any price which it would not
gladly give for the secret.

The worst apprehensions of the directors of this Company were
realized. The public soon became tired of buying India-rubber shoes
that could only be saved during the summer by putting them into a
refrigerator. In the third year of the mania, India-rubber stock began
to decline, and Roxbury itself finally fell to two dollars and a half.
Before the close of 1836, all the Companies had ceased to exist, their
fall involving many hundreds of families in heavy loss. The clumsy,
shapeless shoes from South America were the only ones which the people
would buy. It was generally supposed that the secret of their
resisting heat was that they were smoked with the leaves of a certain
tree, peculiar to South America, and that nothing else in nature would
answer the purpose.

The two millions of dollars lost by these Companies had one result
which has proved to be worth many times that sum; it led Charles
Goodyear to undertake the investigation of India-rubber. That chance
conversation with the agent of the Roxbury Company fixed his destiny.
If he were alive to read these lines, he would, however, protest
against the use of such a word as _chance_ in this connection. He
really appears to have felt himself "called" to study India-rubber. He
says himself:--

"From the time th