a AUTOBIOGRAPHY. (1812, 
grandfather’s fingers. This appears to have qualified 
him to be the clerk in charge, or manager, of the 
office and store of the Paris Furnace Company, which 
established a small iron-smelting furnace on the 
Sauquoit, two and a half miles above the village of 
Sauquoit, in a deep and narrow valley which had the 
name of Paris Furnace Hollow, now called Clayville, 
the furnace long since having disappeared, a natural 
consequence of the exhaustion of the charcoal fur- 
nished by the woods of the surrounding hills. My 
earliest recollections are of Paris Furnace Hollow, 
for not long after I was born, as aforesaid, in 
Sauquoit, on the eastern or Methodist side of the 
creek, on the 18th of November, 1810, my father and 
mother removed to Paris Furnacé with me, their ip 
born, and set up a small tannery there. Of this I 
retain some vivid recollections, eared Sales con- 
nected with the first use to which I was put, the 
driving round the ring of the old one which turned 
the bark-mill, and the supplying the said mill with its 
grist of bark, — a lonely and monotonous occupation.! 
1 Moses Gray was a man of great activity and energy. He soon 
added a shoe-shop to his tannery, where he hired a few hands to make 
shoes from the hides he tanned, taking these again by wagon to 
Albany, a journey of many days, where he bought his skins and some 
“ 
ever, is still beautiful, and the house which Moses Gray py two 
or three years later yet stands, with a lovely near view tream 
and hill and wood. Asa Gray remembered = father elon it. 
Busy as the father was out of doors, the m was perhaps busier 
still. Asa, the younger brother by the first wife, was dying of con- 
sumption ; ‘he was moved on a bed from Sauquoit to Paris Furnace, 
