"'Don't try to discourage me,' he answered. 'I know I shall succeed. What is hidden and unknown and cannot be discovered by scientific research will most likely be discovered by accident; and it will be discovered by the one who applies himself most perseveringly to his task.' [Illustration: NATIVES DRYING RUBBER] "No one could dissuade him. He borrowed money and made several hundred pairs of handsome rubber shoes that, when summer came, melted and smelled so bad they had to be buried; he won a prize for his beautiful rubber tablecloths and piano covers, but a drop of acid stained and spoiled them. The story of these years was disappointment and poverty. Once, to pay the house-rent, Mrs. Goodyear had to sell the household linen that she herself had spun; and many times, if kind friends had not sent food and money, the little Goodyear children would have had nothing to eat. "Still, even in those dark days, there were moments of rejoicing. Three times Goodyear thought he had succeeded: once, when he mixed magnesia with the rubber; once, when he boiled the rubber in quicklime and water; and once, when he cured the surface of his rubber with what chemists call nitric acid. Moreover, another experimenter gave him a valuable clue. Some one in Massachusetts, a man named Hayward, I believe, claimed that in a dream, he had been told to use sulphur in rubber-curing. He obeyed the dream, patented the process, and sold the patent to Goodyear. After that, Goodyear could make thin rubber fabric that could withstand both heat and cold. But he wanted to cure rubber in masses, not in films." "Couldn't he sell the things he made of the thin rubber, Grandfather?" "Yes, he sold a number of aprons and tablecloths and such articles, but they didn't bring him much money. They attracted attention to him, though, and pretty soon the national post office department gave him an order for one hundred and fifty mail bags. Here was his opportunity. He was almost sure of success this time, for it was summer, and the heat did not seem to affect the rubber at all. Still, when the bags were finished, he hung them up for hotter weather to test, and took a vacation. When he returned, the mail bags were dropping from their hooks in shapeless, ill-smelling lumps. The world said, 'We told you so.' But Goodyear said to me after that failure, 'It wasn't the curing, Hobart, that ruined those bags. It was the coloring matter. That made them decompose.'