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THE

CHAPTER XX.

THE HOME OF RUMFORD.

"Fortune does not change men, it only unmasks them."

HE world knows by heart the career of this extraordinary man. Sated with honors, he died at Auteuil, near Paris, August 21, 1814. Titles, decorations, and the honorary distinctions of learned societies flowed in upon the poor American youth such as have seldom fallen to the lot of one risen from the ranks of the people. The antecedents and character of the man have very naturally given rise to much inquiry and speculation.

Benjamin Thompson was born in the west end of his grandfather's house in North Woburn, March 26, 1753. The room where he first drew breath is on the left of the entrance, and on the first floor. As for the house, it is a plain, old-fashioned, two-story farm-house, with a gambrel roof, out of which is thrust one of those immense chimneys of great breadth and solidity. A large willow which formerly stood between the house and the road has disappeared, and is no longer a guide to the spot. This ancient dwelling has a pleasant situation on a little rising ground back from the road, which here embraces in its sweep the old house and the queer little meeting-house, its neighbor.

A pretty little maiden deftly binding shoes, and an elderly female companion who had passed twenty years of her life under this roof, were the occupants of the apartment in which Count Rumford was born. A Connecticut clock, which ticked noisily above the old fireplace, and a bureau, the heirloom of several generations, were two very dissimilar objects among the furniture of the room. There are no relics of the Thompsons remaining there.

The father of our subject died while Benjamin was yet an infant, and the widowed mother made a second marriage with Josiah Pierce, Jr., of Woburn, when the future Count of the Holy Roman Empire was only three years old. After this event Mrs. Pierce removed from the old house to another which formerly stood opposite the Baldwin Place, half a mile nearer the centre of Woburn.

At the age of thirteen young Thompson was apprenticed to John Appleton, a shopkeeper of Salem, Massachusetts, and in 1769 he entered the employment of Hopestill Capen in Boston. While at Salem, Thompson was engaged during his leisure moments in experiments in chemistry and mechanics, and it is recorded that in one branch of science he one day blew himself up with some explosive materials he was preparing, while on the other hand he walked one night from Salem to Woburn, a distance of twenty odd miles, to exhibit to his friend Loammi Baldwin a machine he had contrived, and with which he expected to illustrate the problem of perpetual motion. His mind appears at this period absorbed in these fascinating studies to an extent which must have impaired his usefulness in his master's shop.

A few doors south of Boston Stone every one may see an antiquated building of red brick, a souvenir of the old town, which was standing here long before the Revolution. Strange freaks have been playing in its vicinity since Benjamin Thompson tended behind the counter there. The canal at the back has been changed into solid earth, and sails are no more seen mysteriously gliding through the streets from the harbor to the Mill-pond. The facsimile of Sir Thomas Gresham's grasshopper, on the pinnacle of Faneuil Hall, is about the only object left in the neighborhood familiar to the eye of the apprentice, who, we may assume, would not have been absent from the memorable convocations which were held within the walls of the old temple in his day. The building with which Rumford's name is thus connected forms the angle where Marshall's Lane enters Union Street, and bears the sign of the descendant of the second oysterman

in Boston, himself for fifty years a vender of the delicious bivalve.

Thompson's master, Hopestill Capen, becomes a public character through his apprentice, whom he may still have regarded as of little advantage in the shop by reason of his strongly developed scientific vagaries. Capen had been a carpenter, with whom that good soldier, Lemuel Trescott, served his time. He married an old maid who kept a little dry-goods store in Union Street, and then, uniting matrimony and trade in one harmonious partnership, abandoned tools and joined his wife in the shop. Samuel Parkman, afterwards a well-known Boston merchant, was Thompson's fellow-apprentice. The famous Tommy Capen succeeded to the shop and enjoyed its custom.

Thompson, at nineteen, went to Concord, New Hampshire, then known as Rumford, and from which his titular designation was taken. At this time he was described as of "a fine manly make and figure, nearly six feet in height, of handsome features, bright blue eyes, and dark auburn hair." He soon after married the widow of Colonel Benjamin Rolfe, a lady ten or a dozen years his senior. Rumford himself is reported by his friend Pictet as having said, "I married, or rather I was married, at the age of nineteen." One child, a daughter, was the result of this marriage. She was afterwards known as Sarah,

Countess of Rumford.

If Rumford meant to convey to Pictet the idea that his union with Mrs. Rolfe was a merely passive act on his part, or that she was the wooer and he only the consenting party, he put in a plea for his subsequent neglect which draws but little on our sympathy. His wife, according to his biographers, took him to Boston, clothed him in scarlet, and was the means of introducing him to the magnates of the Colony.

The idea forces itself into view that at this time Rumford's ambition was beginning to develop into the moving principle of his life. The society and notice of his superiors in worldly station appears to have impressed him greatly, and it is evident that the agitation which wide differences with the mother

country was then causing in the Colonies did not find in him that active sympathy which was the rule with the young and ardent spirits of his own age. He grew up in the midst of troubles which moulded the men of the Revolution, and at a time when not to be with his brethren was to be against them. We seldom look in a great national crisis for hesitation or deliberation at twenty-one.

Certain it is that Rumford fell under the suspicions of his own friends and neighbors as being inclined to the royalist side. He met the accusation boldly, and as no specific charges of importance were made against him, nothing was proven. The feeling against him, however, was so strong that he fled from his home to escape personal violence, taking refuge at first at his mother's home in Woburn, and subsequently at Charlestown.

Thompson was arrested by the Woburn authorities after the battle of Lexington, was examined, and released; but the taint of suspicion still clung to him. He petitioned the Provincial Congress to investigate the charges against him, but they refused to consider the application. He remained in the vicinity of the camps at Cambridge, vainly endeavoring to procure a commission in the service of the Colony, until October, 1775, when he suddenly took his departure, and is next heard of within the enemy's lines at Boston.

In the short time intervening between October and March, the month in which Howe's forces evacuated Boston, Thompson had acquired such a confidential relation with that general as to be made the bearer of the official news of the end of the siege to Lord George Germaine. He does not seem to have embraced the opportunity of remaining neutral under British protection, as did hundreds of others, but at once makes himself serviceable, and casts his lot with the British army.

It has been well said that nothing can justify a man in becoming a traitor to his country. Thompson's situation with the army at Cambridge must have been wellnigh intolerable, but he had always the alternative of living down the clamors

against him, or of going into voluntary exile. His choice of a course which enabled him to do the most harm to the cause of his countrymen gives good reason to doubt whether the attachment he had once professed for their quarrel was grounded on any fixed principles. Be that as it may, from the time he clandestinely withdrew from the Americans until the end of the war his talents and knowledge were directed to their overthrow with all the zeal of which he was capable.

From this point Rumford's career is a matter of history. At his death he was a count of the Holy Roman Empire, lieutenant-general in the service of Bavaria, F. R. S., Foreign Fellow of the French Institute, besides being a knight of the orders of St. Stanislaus and of the White Eagle.

Rumford had derived some advantage from his attendance at the lectures of Professor Winthrop, of Harvard University, on Natural Philosophy. With his friend, Loammi Baldwin, he had been accustomed to walk from Woburn to Cambridge to be present at these lectures. Being at the camp, he had assisted in packing up the apparatus for removal when the College buildings were occupied by the soldiery. In his will he remembered the University by a legacy of a thousand dollars annually, besides the reversion of other sums, for the purpose of founding a professorship in the physical and mathematical sciences, the improvement of the useful arts, and for the extension of industry, prosperity, and the well-being of society. Jacob Bigelow, M. D., was the first incumbent of the chair of this professorship.

A miniature of Count Rumford, from which the portrait in Sparks's Biography was engraved, is, or was, in the possession of George W. Pierce, Esq. The Count is painted in a blue coat, across which is worn a broad blue ribbon. A decoration appears on the left breast. The miniature, a work of much artistic excellence, bears a certain resemblance to the late President Pierce, a distant relative of the Count. It is a copy from a portrait painted by Kellenhofer of Munich, in 1792, and is inscribed on the back, probably in Rumford's own hand, "Pre

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