What could have been the feelings of my family, and my large circle of friends and acquaintances, to see creditors and officers coming to our house every day with their pockets full of attachments and piles of them on the table every night.  If any one can ever begin to know my feelings at this time, they must have passed through the same experience.  Yet mortified and abused as I was, I had to put up with it.  Thank God, I have never been the means of such trouble for others.  I had to move to Waterbury in my old age, and there commence again to try to get a living.  I moved in the fall of 1856, and as bad luck would have it, rented a house not two rods from a large church with a very large steeple attached to it, which had been built but a short time before.  In one of the most terrific hurricanes and snow storms that I ever knew in my life, at four o’clock in the morning of January 19th, 1857, this large steeple fell on the top of our house which was a three story brick building.  It broke through the roof and smashed in all the upper tier of rooms, the bricks and mortar falling to the lower floor.  We were in the second story, and some of the bricks came into our room, breaking the glass and furniture, and the heaviest part of the whole lay directly on our house.  It was the opinion of all who saw the ruins that we did not stand one chance in ten thousand of not being killed in a moment.  I heard many a man say he would not take the chances that we had for all the money in the State.  One man in the other part of the house was so frightened that he was crazy for a long time.  Timbers in this steeple, ten inches square, broke in two directly over my bed and their weight was tremendous.  I now began to think that my troubles were coming in a different form; but it seems I was not to die in that way.  The business took a different shape in the spring, and I moved (another task of moving!) to Ansonia.  Here I lived two years, but very unfortunately happened to get in with the worst men that could be found on the line of Rail-road between Winsted and Bridgeport.  In another part of this book I have spoken of them; I do not now wish to think of them, for it makes me sick to see their names on paper.  I had worked hard ever since I left New Haven—­one year at Waterbury, and two at this place (Ansonia,)—­but got not one dollar for the whole time.  I was robbed of all the money which Mr. Stevens, (my son-in-law,) had paid me for the use of my trade-mark in England, for the years 1857-’58.  This advantage was taken of me, because I could collect nothing in my own name.

I should consider my history incomplete, unless I went back for many years to speak of the treatment which I received from a certain man.  I shall not mention his name, and my object in relating these circumstances, is to illustrate a principle there is in man, and to caution the young men to be careful when they get to be older and are carrying on business, not to do too much for one individual.  If you