The year 1827 was a dull one so far as business was concerned, and I read Chinese with my teacher 'Le.' At length the tea season commenced in October. When the ships began to arrive, unpleasant news came also. My brother, of the office of Thomas H. Smith and Son (as it had become), wrote me that 'difficulties' existed in the affairs of the house. Finally it stopped payment and went into liquidation, but from causes not attributable to its China business. The Canton agency had therefore to be closed. Consulting with Mr. Olyphant in regard to myself, he advised me to return to New York, where only my position could be arranged. As usual at the time of which I write, certain indentures between employers and _employés_ were usually drawn up. They existed between Mr. Smith and myself. In them, he engaged to send me to China for the purpose of acquiring the Chinese language, and then to be employed in his Factory at Canton, as clerk or Factor, and I was to render him service until I should have reached the age of twenty-one. It was a long time for me to look forward to in 1827. Several ships of the New York house were loading which had arrived in regular course before insurmountable difficulties had occurred. Amongst them was the 'Mary Lord,' Captain Rosseter. I left in her and arrived in a good run of 120 days. My fellow-passenger was Mr. Daniel Stansbury, whose name has become identified with the American trade at Canton from his having been the inventor of a measuring rod, by which cargoes were ever after measured. It proved to be an instrument of wonderful accuracy and rapidity, simple in the extreme, as well as the most convenient that can be imagined. 'Stansbury's measuring rod,' now proverbial, dates from our last war with Great Britain, 1812, when the inventor, being at Canton, and business with the United States suspended for some time, in his days of forced idleness he conceived the actual mode of measuring cargoes, which up to that time had been measured with the foot rule!