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KING" CAPRON in graceful curves, and divided by pleasant islands, is lost to the eye amid the lovely woodlands. In 1816, when he was twenty years old, Hiram felt an urge to move .! ~ ~westward in search of his fortune. First, he turned his face towards the Adirondacks -towards the peaks of Owl Pate and Moose Moun- tain, which lay across Lake Champlain thirty miles to the north-west, and which could easily be seen from Leicester on a clear day. He had decided to go to the frontier village of Malone in northern New York State, a distance of I35 miles. There is no record of what he did in Malone; nor of why within two months he returned to Leicester. Nor is there any clear record of why, less than a year later, in November of I817, when the winter .J~ winds had begun to blow through the forest, he obeyed with sudden and precipitous haste a new urge to go west - except that (as re- lated in Hlistory of Brant County) "having a marked talent for caligraphy, he became a writing master in a young ladies' academy and was so imprudent as to give one of his fair pupils a lesson in a more difficult art than that of penmanship." Whether or not he was an imprudent quill-master, Hiram left home suddenly and found his way 240 miles into the frontier lands south of Rochester. Concerning this move, he later made the following note: I came into Western New York State in February, 1818, nearly penniless, with only the clothes on my back, and my hands and head. Thus my stock of trade was small, but I had one capital chance -the whole world lay before me to operate in. From the moment Hiram arrived in western New York State, Fortune seemed to smile upon him. About twenty miles south of Rochester, close to the village of Manchester, he came across a man named Theophilus Short. Short had migrated to the district about 1794. In I804, after successfully founding and operating a brick- yard in Richmond, he moved to Manchester and bought 500o acres of land along a stream called the Canandaigua Outlet. On this ]0 ~ stream he built flour and saw mills, and founded a settlement that is still called Shortsville in his honor. And he seems to have invested money in a Manchester blast-furnace. Short may have been a distant relative of Hiram Capron. He was born at Rhehobeth, Massachusetts, a few miles from Attleboro, where Banfield Capron had settled. He was evidently known to the parents of Hiram Capron. He went out of his way to help Hiram. And there is a tradition, but no direct evidence, that he was an uncle by marriage. At first, Short hired Capron as one of his bookkeepers at a salary of $8.oo a week. Then, a few months later, having begun to ap- preciate the young man's intelligence, industry and initiative, he secured for him a position as superintendent of the blast-furnace. l27