ffering, he agonized for the great discovery.
Had it been merely wealth that he was working for, doubtless he would
have turned back and sought some other means of obtaining it; but he
sought more. He was striving for the good of his fellow-men, and
ambitious of becoming a benefactor of the race. He felt that he had a
mission to fulfill, and no one else could perform it.

He was right. A still greater success was about to crown his labors, but
in a manner far different from his expectations. His experiments had
developed nothing; chance was to make the revelation. It was in the
spring of 1839 that this revelation came to him, and in the following
manner: Standing before a stove in a store at Woburn, Massachusetts, he
was explaining to some acquaintances the properties of a piece of
sulphur-cured India-rubber which he held in his hand. They listened to
him good-naturedly, but with evident incredulity, when suddenly he
dropped the rubber on the stove, which was red hot. His old cloths would
have melted instantly from contact with such heat; but, to his surprise,
this piece underwent no such change. In amazement, he examined it, and
found that while it had charred or shriveled, like leather, it had not
softened at all. The bystanders attached no importance to this
phenomenon, but to him it was a revelation. He renewed his experiments
with enthusiasm, and in a little while established the facts that
India-rubber, when mixed with sulphur and exposed to a certain degree of
heat for a certain time, would not melt or even soften at any degree of
heat, that it would only char at two hundred and eighty degrees, and
that it would not stiffen from exposure to any degree of cold. The
difficulty now consisted in finding out the exact degree of heat
necessary for the perfection of the rubber, and the exact length of time
required for the heating.

He made this discovery in his darkest days; when, in fact, he was in
constant danger of arrest for debt, having already been a frequent
inmate of the debtor's prison. He was in the depths of bitter poverty,
and in such feeble health that he was constantly haunted by the fear of
dying before he had perfected his discovery--before he had fulfilled his
mission. His poverty was a greater drawback to him than ever before. He
needed an apparatus for producing a high and uniform heat for his
experiments, and he was unable to obtain it. He used to bake his
compound in his wife's bread oven, and ste