A few years before the Civil War, the Jerome Company failed and, curiously enough, this failure came about through its connection with that usually successful man, P. T. Barnum, the famous showman. The story is too much complicated to be given here in detail, but it seems that Barnum had become heavily interested in a smaller clock company, which was merged with the Jerome concern. The overvaluation of its stock, combined with mismanagement and speculation among the officials of the Jerome Company, served to drive the whole business into bankruptcy. Barnum lost heavily, and it took him years to clear up his obligations. Jerome never did recover from it; after some years of failing power in the employ of other manufacturers, he died in comparative poverty. His long and eventful life spans the whole growth of the American clock business from the days of Eli Terry and his handsawed wooden movements down to the maturity of the modern business supplying, by factory methods and the use of specialized machinery, millions of clocks to all parts of the world. He had made clocks all over Connecticut, in Plymouth, Farmington, Bristol, New Haven and Waterbury, as well as in Massachusetts and, for a time, in South Carolina and Virginia. He had worked with his hands for Terry and Seth Thomas at the old wooden wheels and veneered cases, which were peddled about the country and sold for thirty or forty dollars each to be the treasured timekeepers of many households. And he had headed a modern factory, turning out dollar clocks by the tens of thousands. It is said that a child in the first few years of its life lives briefly through the whole evolution of civilized mankind. That "infant industry," American clock-making, likewise, in the short space of fifty years passed through most of the steps of the whole growth of time-recording between the Middle Ages and our own era. This country stands now among the leading clock-making nations of the world; its product is famous in every land and a timepiece from Waterbury or New Haven may mark the minutes in the town from which Gerbert was banished for sorcery because he made a time-machine, or in that land between the rivers where the Babylonians first looked out upon the stars. Most of the American clocks are still made in Connecticut; in fact, more than eighty per cent of the whole world's supply (excluding the German) comes from the Naugatuck Valley. The New Haven Clock Company, which is the successor of the Jerome Company, is to-day one of the largest. As far back as 1860, it was producing some two hundred thousand clocks a year. The Seth Thomas Company and others of the historic concerns are still at work in various portions of the state. And the Benedict & Burnham Company, with which, at one time, Chauncey Jerome was associated, became the Waterbury Clock Company, now regarded as the largest clock producer, and of which we shall hear more later on.