Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 10.djvu/405

 Inventors as Martyrs to Science.

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��ing dry upon me because of the rains that fell." After umnberless experi- ments he bought a large stock of crockery, which as usual he broke into small fragments, three or four luindred of which he covered with various mixtures and sent to a pottery some league and a half off, request- ing the workmen to bake this strange batch with their other vessels. Alas ! when the trial pieces were drawn out they proved absolutely worthless. Not the smallest appearance of the longed-for enamel was to be seen. IJut he would not give up. More batches were sent with the same re- sult, — " with great cost, loss of time, confusion, and sorrow." Three years were spent in this way ; — his wife was sorrowful and pale, the babies ill and half starved, real want stared them in the face, one little child had died from lack of proper noui-ishment. Something must be done. His poor wife urged that food and medicine must be thought of. And fortunate- ly he was now emi)Ioyed to survey the salt marshes of Saintonge, which was a profitable job and occupied several months, and Lisette, his worn and anxious wife once more smiled and slept and began to iiope.

But the fever returned, and his neighbors became excited over his strange behavior. Day after day lit- tle knots of gossips might be seen lounging about the neighborhood of his garden and workshed. exiiressing their surprise and indignation at his conduct, and exclaimed in meas- ured tei'ms against his obstinacy and mad folly. This excitement reached its height when one day the report spread far and wide that the poor man was actually insane, and had torn up

��the palings of his garden and the planks off his house, and that his un- happy wife, half crazed by his con- duct, had rushed out of the house accompanied by her children, and had taken refuge with a neighbor. He had even burned the kitchen table. Was it any marvel if his wife grew moody, and that hard judgment was pronounced upon a man who spent his time in buying pots and breaking them, in grinding drugs and burning them, and in going to and fro upon his bootless errand. Death had twice entered his door bearing away two puny, sickly infants. Poor Lisette ! Her temper had been soured by dis- appointment and trouble, and hope so long deferred ceased to buoy up her spirit. She could not understand the course Bernard was pursuing. She could not participate in his glowino- visions of future fame and prosperity, and the instinct of power and the energy of will that flerved and in- spii-ed him were all unknown to and unshared by her. She felt as any other common-sense wife and mother would have felt in her circumstances, and, bewailing his obstinate persist- ence in such profitless Jabor, she em- bittered his home by her lamentations and reproaches.

And Palissy's position was terrible. He discharged his only workman, and for want of money to pay him gave him part of his clothes. Nothius; but reproaches at home from his starvinp- family, and the neighbors regarded him as a madman. He savs, — "I suffered an anguish which I cannot speak, for I was quite exhausted and dried np by the heat of the furnace; it was more than a month since mv shirt had been dry upon me. Further

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