"Yes, Lucy, that's an advertisement of the Charles Goodyear I mean. I've known him a good many years (he's only a little younger than I, and we were both born in New Haven), and he's had a hard, sad life so far. To be sure, he's reckoned now as one of New Haven's prosperous business men; but unless he wins this suit, his poverty will come back again. Shall I tell you a little about him so that you'll understand some of the references you'll be sure to hear at the trial?" [Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF CHARLES GOODYEAR] "Oh, I wish you would, Grandfather." Breakfast was over then; and as Grandmother went to the kitchen to give her orders for the day, Grandfather said: "You and I, Lucy, will sit in front of the fire a little while and talk about Mr. Goodyear. But first you'd better go with Grandmother and let her give you my galoshes and my rubber cap, and her rubber shoes and your own." A little girl of to-day, on hearing that request, might not know exactly what she had been sent for. Rubber goods were too expensive then to be common, and "rubber shoes" had not been shortened to our "rubbers." The awkward _galoshes_ was just a name for high rubber shoes, or overshoes. Lucy came back soon, her arms full. The cap she placed on a table, and the three pairs of rubber shoes she put carefully down to warm in front of the fire. "It wouldn't have been safe to put my galoshes that I had twenty years ago so near the fire," commented Grandfather, as Lucy drew up her chair beside his. "Can you guess what would have happened to them?" "Would the fire have burned them, Grandfather?" "Not exactly, but it would have melted them,--at least have made them as soft as suet. What Goodyear has done is to invent a way of preparing rubber or gum elastic so that it can be used in various thicknesses without being stiff as iron in cold weather or softening like wax with the heat." Then Grandfather interrupted his statements with a question: "Do you know where we get gum elastic, Lucy?" "Let's pretend I don't know anything about rubber," answered Lucy judiciously, after a pause. "You begin at the beginning, Grandfather." Grandfather smiled at the little girl's strategy and began at the beginning. "Gum elastic is really the dried sap of the South American rubber tree. To get it, the trees are tapped, just as maple trees are tapped here. But the rubber sap is yellowish white and thick as cream. The natives of Brazil long ago discovered that this sap, when hardened, would keep out water. So they made bottles from it and sent the bottles to Europe and the United States. Finally the Portuguese settlers in South America made the hardened sap into shoes; and in 1820 I saw in Boston the first pair of rubber shoes ever brought into the United States. They were as clumsy looking as Chinese shoes. They were gilded, too, not so much to make them beautiful as to keep the rubber from melting." [Illustration: TAPPING A RUBBER TREE]