on of all his products except
his thinnest cloth, suddenly and totally destroyed his rising
business. Everything he possessed that was salable was sold at auction
to pay his debts. He was again penniless and destitute, with an
increased family and an aged father dependent upon him.

His friends, his brothers, and his wife now joined in dissuading him
from further experiments. Were not four years of such vicissitude
enough? Who had ever touched India-rubber without loss? Could he hope
to succeed, when so many able and enterprising men had failed? Had he
a right to keep his family in a condition so humiliating and painful?
He had succeeded in the hardware business; why not return to it? There
were those who would join him in any rational under-taking; but how
could he expect that any one would be willing to throw more money into
a bottomless pit that had already ingulfed millions without result?
These arguments he could not answer, and we cannot; the friends of all
the great inventors have had occasion to use the same. It seemed
highly absurd to the friends of Fitch, Watt, Fulton, Wedgwood,
Whitney, Arkwright, that they should forsake the beaten track of
business to pursue a path that led through the wilderness to nothing
but wilderness. Not one of these men, perhaps, could have made a
reasonable reply to the remonstrances of their friends. They only
felt, as poor Goodyear felt, that the steep and thorny path which they
were treading was the path they _must_ pursue. A power of which they
could give no satisfactory account urged them on. And when we look
closely into the lives of such men, we observe that, in their dark
days, some trifling circumstance was always occurring that set them
upon new inquiries and gave them new hopes. It might be an _ignis
fatuus_ that led them farther astray, or it might be genuine light
which brought them into the true path.

Goodyear might have yielded to his friends on this occasion, for he
was an affectionate man, devoted to his family, had not one of those
trifling events occurred which inflamed his curiosity anew. During his
late transient prosperity, he had employed a man, Nathaniel Hayward by
name, who had been foreman of one of the extinct India-rubber
companies. He found him in charge of the abandoned factory, and still
making a few articles on his own account by a new process. To harden
his India-rubber, he put a very small quantity of sulphur into it, or
sprinkled sulphur upon th