deal of trouble with this case and rather than have it go to another court, had to come to this man’s terms.  The foreman told me afterwards that he had no doubt but this man was bought.  New York is a hard place to have a law suit in.  This cheat had been carried on for years, both in this country and in Europe,—­using my labels and selling poor articles, and in this way robbing me of my reputation by the basest means.  After this Sperry, who was in company with Shaw, had been dead a short time, a statement was published in the New York papers that this Henry Sperry was a wonderful man, and that he was the first man who went to England with Yankee clocks.  After I had sent over my two men and had got my clocks well introduced, and had them there more than a year, Sperry & Shaw, hearing that we were doing well and selling a good many, thought they would take a trip to Europe, and took along perhaps fifty boxes of clocks.  I have since heard that their conduct was very bad while there, and this is all they did towards introducing clocks.  There is no one who can claim any credit of introducing American clocks into that country excepting myself.  After I had opened a store in New York, we did, in a measure, stop these men from using my labels.

I have said that when I got up this one day brass clock in 1838, that the fourth chapter in the Yankee clock business had commenced.  Perhaps Seth Thomas hated as bad as any one did to change his whole business of clock making for the second time, and adopt the same thing that I had introduced.  He never invented any thing new, and would now probably have been making the same old hang-up wood clocks of fifty years ago, had it not been for others and their improvements.  He was highly incensed at me because I was the means of his having to change.  He hired a man to go around to my customers and offer his clocks at fifty and seventy-five cents less than I was selling.  A man by the name of J.C.  Brown carried on the business in Bristol a long time, and made a good many fine clocks, but finally gave up the business.  Elisha Monross, Smith & Goodrich, Brewster & Ingraham were all in the same business, but have given it up, and the clock making of Connecticut is now mostly done in five large factories in different parts of the State, about which I shall speak hereafter.

CHAPTER VIII.

Further improvements in cheap time-keepers. 
—­The process of clock making.—­

It would be no doubt interesting to a great many to know what improvements have been made in manufacturing clocks during the past twenty years.  I recollect I paid for work on the O.G. case one dollar and seventy-five cents; for the same work in 1855, I paid twenty cents, and many other things in the same proportion.  The last thing that I invented, which has proved to be of great usefulness, was the one day timepiece that can be sold for seventy-five cents, and a fair