“In 1749 Sherman used his mathematical attainments for a new purpose. He prepared an almanac for 1750, which was published in New York, and was the first of a series which he put out during a considerable period of years. “By this time he had saved some money, and, in 1750, we find him putting part of his capital, in partnership with his elder brother, into a country store. This was a business in which he was interested first at New Milford, and then at New Haven, with a branch at Wallingford, for more than twenty years. “The country store then, as now in the more thinly settled communities, was in miniature the department store of our modern cities. There were few of them, and their customers came from a wide circuit of country. The trade was largely one of barter. The farmer’s wife drove in with her cheese and butter, and might go back with stuff for a dress, a box of needles, a new coffee-pot, a bottle of salts, a loaf of sugar, a quintal of codfish, and perhaps a volume of sermons. The store was not daily visited by drummers. The proprietor went himself every few months to Boston or Newport, New York or Philadelphia, to replenish his stock, and with every such journey found his mental horizon broadened, and felt better acquainted with the great world of men and things that lay beyond the limits of his own neighborhood. “Sherman, from the first, made the most of these glimpses of a larger life. If he rode down to New Haven to buy West India molasses, he would visit the college to ask President Clap’s opinion about the probable course of an expected comet.[19] If he went to New York to correct the proofs of his almanac, he would take the opportunity to find a publisher for some pamphlet he had written on the financial errors in the legislation of the day. “Sherman, by this time, had acquired the faculty, rarer, perhaps, then than now, of expressing his thoughts in writing, in a fashion that was simple, clear, and straightforward. An artificial, overwrought, and overladen style of composition, if not the prevailing one, was certainly not uncommon among Americans during the middle of the eighteenth century. He wrote, as Franklin did, in the plain language of familiar conversation, with no straining after effect. I do not mean that he wrote as well as Franklin. There was a long, long interval between them; but they were of the same school. Both were men who thought more of what they had to say than of how they said it; of communicating facts or ideas, rather than of seeking to make them attractive by ornament.