It was a very pleasant family that I lived with while learning my trade. In the year 1809 my "boss" took a job in Torringford, and I went with him. After being absent several months from home, I felt very anxious to see my poor mother who lived about two miles from Plymouth. She lived alone--with the exception of my youngest brother about nine years old. I made up my mind that I would go down and see her one night. In this way I could satisfy my boss by not losing any time. It was about twenty miles, and I only sixteen years old. I was really sorry after I had started, but was not the boy to back out. It took me till nearly morning to get there, tramping through the woods half of the way; every noise I heard I thought was a bear or something that would kill me, and the frightful notes of the whippoorwill made my hair stand on end. The dogs were after me at every house I passed. I have never forgotten that night. The boys of to-day do not see such times as I did. The next year, 1810, my boss took a job in Ellsworth Society, Litchfield County. I footed it to and from that place several times in the course of the year, with a load of joiners' tools on my back. What would a boy 17 years old now think to travel thirty miles in a hot summer's day, with a heavy load of joiners' tools on his back? But that was about the only way that we could get around in those days. At that time there were not half a dozen one-horse wagons in the whole town. At that place I attended the church of Rev. Daniel Parker, father of Hon. Amasa J. Parker, of Albany, who was then a little boy four or five years old. I often saw him at meeting with his mother. He is a first cousin of F.S. & J. Parker of this city, two highly respectable men engaged in the paper business. In the fall of 1811, I made a bargain with the man that I was bound to, that if he would give me four months in the winter of each year when the business was dull, I would clothe myself. I therefore went to Waterbury, and hired myself to Lewis Stebbins, (a singing master of that place,) to work at making the dials for the old fashioned long clock. This kind of business gave me great satisfaction, for I always had a desire to work at clocks. In 1807, when I was fourteen years old, I proposed to my guardian to get me a place with Mr. Eli Terry, of Plymouth, to work at them. Mr. Terry was at that time making more clocks than any other man in the country, about two hundred in a year, which was thought to be a great number.