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 the surface and dried it in the sun.  Mr. Goodyear was surprised to observe that this process seemed to produce the same effect as the application of aquafortis.  It does not appear to have occurred to him that Hayward’s process and his own were essentially the same.  A chemical dictionary would have informed him that sulphuric acid enters largely into the composition of aquafortis, from which he might have inferred that the only difference between the two methods was, that Hayward employed the sun, and Goodyear nitric acid, to give the sulphur effect.  Hayward’s goods, however, were liable to a serious objection:  the smell of the sulphur, in warm weather, was intolerable.  Hayward, it appears, was a very illiterate man; and the only account he could give of his invention was, that it was revealed to him in a dream.  His process was of so little use to him, that Goodyear bought his patent for a small sum, and gave him employment at monthly wages until the mail-bag disaster deprived him of the means of doing so.

In combining sulphur with India-rubber, Goodyear had approached so near his final success that one step more brought him to it.  He was certain that he was very close to the secret.  He saw that sulphur had a mysterious power over India-rubber when a union could be effected between the two substances.  True, there was an infinitesimal quantity of sulphur in his mail-bags, and they had melted in the shade;