endangered the whole train. While the boy was frantically fighting the fire, the Scotch conductor, red-headed and wrathy, rushed in and helped him to put it out.

"By this time they were stopping at Mt. Clemens, where the indignant Scotchman boxed the boy's ears and put him out also. Then the man threw the lad's bottles, apparatus and batteries after him, as if they were unloading a carload of freight there.

"These blows on his ears were the cause of the inventor's life-long deafness. But there never was a gamer sport than Thomas A. Edison. Once, long after this, he saw the labor of years and the outlay of at least two million dollars at the seashore washed away in a single night by a sudden storm. He only laughed and said that was 'spilt milk, not worth crying over.' Disappointments of that sort were 'the fortunes of war' or 'all for the best' to him. The injury so unjustly inflicted on him by that irate conductor was not a defect to him. Many years afterwards he said:

"'This deafness has been of great advantage to me in various ways. When in a telegraph office I could hear only the instrument directly on the table at which I sat, and, unlike the other operators, I was not bothered by the other instruments.

"'Again, in experimenting on the telephone, I had to improve the transmitter so that I could hear it. This made the telephone commercial, as the magneto telephone receiver of Bell was too weak to be used as a transmitter commercially.'

"It was the same with the phonograph. The great defect of that instrument was the rendering of the overtones in music and the hissing consonants in speech. Edison worked over one year, twenty hours a day, Sundays and all, to get the word 'specie' perfectly recorded and reproduced on the phonograph. When this was done, he knew that everything else could be done,—which was a fact.

"'Again,' Edison resumed, 'my nerves have been preserved intact. Broadway is as quiet to me as a country village is to a person with normal hearing.'"

The talk suddenly ceased. Then another voice announced from out of the horn: "The second installment of the lectures on Edison will be given at 3 P.M. next Friday. We will now hear a concert by Wayple's band."

CHAPTER V

OPINIONS

The boys and girls filed out, after most of them had expressed appreciation of Professor Gray's interest in their enjoyment, and on the street a lively discussion started. Terry Watkins was laughing derisively at some remark of Cora Siebold, who, arm in arm with her chum "Dot" Myers, had paused long enough to fire a broadside at him.

"Why don't some of you smarties who talk so much about the wonderful things you can do make yourselves receiving sets! Too lazy? Baseball and swimming and loafing around are all you think about. But leave it to the girls; Dot and I are going to tackle one."

"What? You two? Won't it be a mess? Bet you can't hear yourselves think on it. Girls building a radio! Ho, ho, ho!"

"Bet there'll be a looking-glass in it somewhere," laughed Ted Bissell.

"Well, we aren't planning to ask advice from either of you," Cora said.

"No, and it would be worth very little if you got any," Bill Brown offered, as he and Gus, who had been detained a moment by Professor Gray, joined the loitering group.

"Thanks, Mr. Brown," said Dot, half shyly.

"Who asked you for your two cents' worth?" Terry demanded.

"I'm donating it, to your service. Go and do something yourself before you make fun of others," Bill said.

"That's right, too, Billy. Terry can't drive a carpet tack, nor draw a straight line with a ruler." Ted was always in a bantering mood and eager for a laugh at anybody. "I'll bet Cora's radio will radiate royally and right. You going to make one—you and Gus?"

"I guess we can't afford it," Bill replied quickly. "We're both going to work in the mill next Monday. Long hours and steady, and not too much pay, either. But we need the money; eh, Gus?"

"We do," agreed Gus, smiling.

Bill's countenance was altogether rueful. Life had not been very kind to him and he very naturally longed for some opportunity to dodge continued hardship. He wished that he might, like the boy Edison, make opportunity, but that sounded more plausible in lectures than in real life. He was moodily silent now, while the others engaged in a spirited discussion started by Dot's saying kindly:

"Well, lots of boys and girls have to work and they often are the better for it. Edison did—and was."

"Oh, I guess he could have been just as great, or greater if he hadn't worked," remarked Terry sententiously. "It isn't only poor boys that amount to——"

"Mostly," said Bill.

"Oh, of course, you'd say that. We'll charge your attitude up to envy."

"When I size up some of the rich men's sons I know, I'm rather glad I'm poor," said Bill, "and I would rather make a thousand dollars all by my own efforts than inherit ten thousand."

"I guess you'd take what you could get," Terry offered, and Bill was quick to reply:

"We know there'll be a lot coming to you and it will be interesting to know what you'll do with it and how long you'll have it."

"He will never add anything to it," said Ted, who also was the son of wealth, but not in the least snobbish. The others all laughed at this and Terry turned away angrily.

Bill, further inspired by what he deemed an unfair reference to Edison, began to wax eloquent to the others concerning his hero.

"I don't believe Edison would have amounted to half as much as he has if he hadn't had the hard knocks that a poor fellow always gets. Terry makes me tired with his high and mighty——"

"Oh, don't you mind him!" said Cora.

"You've read a lot about Edison, haven't you, Bill?" asked Dot, knowing that the lame boy possessed a hero worshiper's admiration for the wizard of electricity and an overmastering desire to emulate the great inventor. The girl sat down on the grassy bank, pulled Cora down beside her and in her gentle, kindly way, continued to draw Bill out. "When only quite a little fellow he had become a great reader, the lecturer said."

"I should say he was a reader!" Bill declared. "Why, when he was eleven years old he had read Hume's History of England all through and—"

"Understood about a quarter of it, I reckon," laughed Ted.

"Understood more than you think," Bill retorted. "He did more in that library than just read an old encyclopedia; he got every book off the shelves, one after the other, and dipped into them all, but of course, some didn't interest him. He read a lot on 'most every subject; mostly about science and chemistry and engineering and mechanics, but a lot also on law and even moral philosophy and what you call it? oh—ethics—and all that sort of thing. He had to read to find out things; there seemed to be no one who could tell him the half that he wanted to know, and I guess a lot of people got pretty tired of having him ask so many questions they couldn't answer. And when they would say, 'I don't know,' he'd get mad and yell: 'Why don't you know?'"

"Hume's history,—why, we have that at home, in ten volumes. If he got outside of all of that he was going some!" declared Ted.

"Well, he did, and all of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, too."

"Holy cats! What stopped him?" Ted queried.