22 Life of Coiint Rumford. 



Thompson's delusions came in early youth and were 

 sooner outgrown in manhood, he experimented upon 

 the desideratum of a machine which should realize 

 " perpetual motion." He even thought he had been 

 successful in contriving one. He had the privilege of 

 making occasional visits to his family in Woburn, gen- 

 erally of brief duration, and his conveyance was neces- 

 sarily upon his own feet, and the time taken was not to 

 interfere with his duties to his employer. His friend 

 Baldwin records* that Thompson walked one night 

 from Salem to Woburn, in order to show him parts of 

 this wonderful instrument of wheels, and to explain its 

 mechanical powers. The friend, however, adds that he 

 "was never able to gain any information concerning the 

 principles upon which it was expected to act." 



Though the young apprentice was well understood in 

 Salem to be a dabbler in a great many pursuits and 

 occupations, with tools and experiments and mechanics 

 and chemistry, which did not appertain to his calling 

 with his employer, it does not appear that he failed of 

 rendering him due service. He undoubtedly had an 

 aversion to the business, while compelled by supposed 

 necessity to commit himself to it. His apprenticeship 

 covered a period of intense popular excitement over the 

 preliminary events leading to the Revolutionary War. 

 The youth must have heard the heated discussions of 

 the time, and been more or less initiated understand- 

 ingly into the merits of the issue which was soon to 

 open, disastrously as it at first seemed to bear on his 

 own personal experience. His employer was among the 

 signers of the non-importation agreement, by which the 

 mercantile and trading class in the Province sought to 



* In the "Literary Miscellany," Cambridge. Vol. I. pp. 352-361. 



