Life of Count Rumford. 25 



The following is written on the back of the above : 



" WOBURN, Aug 1 . isth, 1769. 



" SIR, There was but few beings (for Inhabitants of this 

 world) created before the airy Element was : so it has not been 

 transmitted down to us how the Great Creator formed the 

 matter thereof. So I shall leave it till I am asked only the 

 Natural cause, and why it blows so many ways in so short a 

 time as it does." 



In the autumn of 1769, Thompson was sent to Bos- 

 ton, to engage in a business similar to that which he 

 had been learning at Salem. He was put as an appren- 

 tice clerk with Mr. Hopestill Capen, a dry-goods dealer. 

 Here he had as a fellow-apprentice the late Samuel Park- 

 man, who became, after the Revolutionary War, one of 

 the largest and richest merchants of Boston. Thomp- 

 son records the beginning of his attendance on a French 

 school, held in the evening, on October 27, 1769. He 

 remained in this situation till the spring of the following 

 year, and would appear then to have left it from the 

 falling off in the business of his employer, who had also 

 entered into the non-importation agreement. 



I have seen it stated as a matter of fact by one of 

 Count Rumford's biographers, in a sketch already re- 

 ferred to,* that young Thompson, while in the employ 

 of Mr. Capen, was present on the 5th of March, 1770, 

 on the occasion known to fame and popular oratory as 

 " the Boston Massacre " ; when the hated soldiery, repre- 

 senting, in our capital, the cause of tyranny, goaded by 

 the jeers and insults of a street crowd of boys and men, 

 fired into it and killed four victims. It is said that 

 Thompson "was there found, sword in hand, among 

 the most eager to attack those whom he considered the 



* American Journal of Science. Vol. XXXIII. p. 24. 



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