He then invented a method of polishing crystals and precious stones. The amount of this valuable material in the hands of the good people of Connecticut was apparently not sufficient to afford him a livelihood, and we find him next engaged as an undertaker and a singing master. In this latter connection he was summoned before the authorities by certain good people who were greatly scandalized because while in charge of a church choir he had introduced the use of a bass viol into the services. This was deemed little short of blasphemy, but apparently no technical charge could be sustained against the culprit. Buel early interested himself in the cause of the freedom of the colonies. Meantime he had evidently been experimenting in type founding, for the petition of 1769 sets forth that the petitioner has discovered the art of casting type, but that he lacks the capital and is, therefore, unable to go into business commercially. He accordingly petitions the Legislature to advance to him the necessary funds. The Legislature voted him a loan of £100 for seven years and promised him £100 more after he had been carrying on the business successfully for one year. As we shall see in a moment, before the year was out Buel’s interest transferred itself elsewhere and we hear no more of his type casting. When the seven years were up Mrs. Buel paid back the £100. Where and how she raised it is something of a mystery, as she asserted when she made the payment that she did not know where her husband was. He was not permanently lost, however. Buel, as we have seen, had interested himself in the cause of American independence, and in 1770 he was arrested for participating in the tearing down of a lead statue of George III which had stood in New York. With true Yankee thrift Buel tried to combine his patriotism and his type founding, for a considerable portion of George III was found in Buel’s house in the process of being cast into type. Things were not lively enough in Connecticut to suit our friend. He went to Boston, where we find him participating in the Boston Tea Party, serving a cannon in the Concord fight, and wounded at Bunker Hill. Later he fell into the hands of the British and was confined in one of the prison ships of unhallowed memory which were moored in Wallabout Bay, Brooklyn. Very likely he was in one of those floating wooden tombs when his wife declared that she did not know where he was. How long he remained as a prisoner of war and what his later military experiences were we do not know. We hear of him next, after the war was over, being appointed to make a map of the coast from Maine to Florida and then appointed master of the mint for Connecticut, where he devised and erected the machinery for striking the copper cents then coined. One wonders if the master of the mint often thought of his youthful conviction for counterfeiting the money of the same community.