Fortunately, there was a well-educated physician in the village of Middletown, William Tully, who had a good library and made it available to young Redfield. The first book the physician handed to William was a very difficult volume on physics. The boy brought it back so soon the doctor thought he had been unable to understand it, but he was pleasantly surprised, for the lad had read it very thoroughly and had come back for more technical works of the time. Soon William gained such an understanding of scientific matters that an intimate friendship with the physician developed. During this time, however, young Redfield felt an increasing urge to visit his mother. But she lived more than seven hundred miles from Middletown and he had very little money. So in 1810 he walked all the way to Ohio. At that time, Ohio had a very small population; it was less than 50,000 at the beginning of the century. The territory intervening between Ohio and Connecticut was pretty wild, with settlements only here and there. William followed primitive roads and trails and at last reached the shores of Lake Erie, where Cleveland and other cities stand today. The next year he walked back to Connecticut. Redfield was now past twenty-one. He had thought deeply of many things while he trudged those lonely trails. He had a vision of a great railway extending from Connecticut to the Mississippi River. Also, his mind kept running back over the stories of storms his father had told him. From his thoughts on this lonely journey he devised and later executed a plan for a line of barges which operated between New York and Albany. But when he arrived in Middletown, he had no course for the time being except to go into business in his trade of saddler and harness maker. To supplement his poor income, he peddled merchandise in the region around Middletown, trudging through the woods and stopping in the villages here and there. The years went by and he kept on studying science in his spare moments. And then, on the third of September, 1821, the center of that vicious hurricane which crossed the eastern part of Connecticut brought its dire evidence to the very door of the man who was still trying to master the sciences in his spare moments. As Redfield trudged the countryside with his wares, he passed among hundreds of big trees felled by the furious winds. Near Middletown, he found that the trees lay with their branches toward the northwest and he remembered that the gale there had begun from the southeast. Less than seventy miles away, he found the trees lying with their heads toward the southeast and here the winds evidently had begun from the northwest. Making inquiries as he went along, Redfield learned the directions from which the winds had blown at various times during the storm. It became quite clear that the hurricane had been a huge whirlwind which had traveled across the country from south to north. He gathered a lot of evidence to prove it.