cation sermon, and was the settled minister there. I was greatly
interested in his preaching for ten years. He has for the last nineteen
years preached at South Farms now the town of Morris. This Mr. Parmelee
was a merchant till he was thirty years old, and was then converted in
some mysterious manner, as St. Paul was, and left his business to preach
the gospel. He proved to be one of the soundest preachers in the land,
and I have no doubt but he will be one of the bright and shining lights
in heaven. Oh! what happy days I saw during those ten years, little
dreaming of the great troubles that were before me, or that I should
experience in after life, which are now resting so heavily upon me, many
times seeming greater than I can bear. But such is life.

About this time, also, Chauncey and Lawson C. Ives, two highly
respectable men, built a factory in Bristol for the purpose of making an
eight day brass clock. This clock was invented by Joseph Ives, a brother
of Chauncey, and sold for about twenty dollars. The manufacture of these
was carried on very successfully for a few years by them, but in 1836,
their business was closed up, they having made about one hundred
thousand dollars. Soon after this, in 1837, came the great panic and
break down of business which extended all over the country. Clock makers
and almost every one else stopped business. I should mention that
another company made the eight day brass clock previous to 1837, Erastus
and Harvey Case and John Birge. Their clocks were retailed mostly in the
southern market. They made perhaps four thousand a year. The Ives Co.,
made about two thousand, but both went out of business in 1837, and it
was thought that clock making was about done with in Conn.

The third chapter, as I have divided it, was now closing up. Wood clocks
were good for time, but it was a slow job to properly make them, and
difficult to procure wood just right for wheels and plates, and it took
a whole year to season it. No factory had made over _Ten_ thousand
in a year; they were always classed with wooden nutmegs and wooden
cucumber seeds, and could not be introduced into other countries to any
advantage. But this was not the only trouble; being on water long as
they would have to be, would swell the wood of the wheels and ruin the
clock. Here then we had the eight day brass clock costing about twenty
dollars; the idea had always been that a brass clock must be an eight
day, and all one day sho