You can't think how hard fathers and mothers used to work and plan to get their children educated in the old days when there were no public schools. The Emersons did some planning, I can assure you.
All the pictures of Ralph Waldo Emerson that I have happened to see show him as a man of middle age, with very smooth hair, and plain but very nice-looking clothes. He looks in these pictures as nurse Richards used to say of my father,—"as if he had just come out of the top bureau drawer."
Well, Ralph Emerson did not always wear fine clothes, but I would not be a bit surprised if he always looked middle-aged. Boys who had as little fun as the Emerson boys had when they were growing up would not be expected to look young.
In the end, Ralph became a minister, as well as a writer, and a lecturer, and a philosopher. His father and his grandfather had been ministers, too. I fancy it was trying to send all these minister-Emersons to school and college that kept each set of parents so poor.
Ralph's father, William Emerson, did not care to be a minister. He wanted to live in a city and teach school, play his bass viol, and belong to musical or singing clubs. But his mother looked ready to cry when he told her this and said: "Why, William, it has taken all the money I had to send you through Harvard College. What good will it do you, if you do not become a preacher?" So, rather than grieve his mother, he agreed to fit himself for preaching. How he hoped he might be sent to some large town! But instead of that, he settled in a small place where neighbors lived two or three miles from each other. He was as lonesome as he could be. He was too poor to buy a horse and too busy to spend half his time walking, so he could not get very well acquainted with the families that came to hear him preach. Besides, his pay was small, and if the kind-heartedfarmers had not brought him a ham, a leg of lamb, or a load of wood now and then, I don't see how he would have managed.
In spite of all these hindrances, William saved a little money in five years. He bought a small farm and got married. As the years went by and there were children to feed, his preaching did not bring half the money they needed, so he taught school, his wife took boarders, and he—even—sold—his—beloved bass viol. And I do not think they felt that anything was too hard if only these children could go to college. Mrs. Emerson was very proud of her husband when he stood in the pulpit on Sundays, and used to shut her eyes and try to imagine how their boys would look in a pulpit.
Finally good luck came their way. Mr. Emerson was asked to preach in Boston. Then he had the city life he loved, he heard good music, and could call on his friends three times a day if he wished, and the boys had fine schools.
None of the children were over ten when this good man, Minister William, died. Andthen came the widow's struggle to educate them. The church members were kind to her; she took boarders again, and sewed and mended with never a complaint, so long as the boys could go to the Latin School. They saw how tired she got and kept wishing they could grow up faster, so they could earn money and let her rest. They helped her wash dishes, and they chopped wood and cleaned vegetables, while the other school-boys played ball, or swam, or skated. There were no play hours for them. They had but one overcoat between them. So they took turns wearing it. Some of the mean, cruel boys at school used to taunt them about it, singing out, when they came in sight: "Well, who is wearing the coat to-day?"
A spinster aunt, Miss Mary Emerson, came to see the family often. She urged the boys to stand high in their classes and thought it would not hurt them to do without play. She read all the fine books aloud to them that she could borrow. Once a caller found her telling the boys stories of great heroes, late at night, so that they might forgetthat they had been without food for a day and a half! They were as poor as that!
Ralph began to go to school when he was three and so was able to enter Harvard College when he was fourteen. He did not have to pay for his room at the president's house because he did errands for him. And to pay for his meals, he waited on tables. That was working to get an education, wasn't it?
Ralph did not find fault because he had to work all the time that he was not studying; he was thinking of his mother. When he won a prize of thirty dollars for declaiming well, he sent it to his mother as fast as the mails could take it and asked her to buy a shawl for herself. But she had to take it to buy food for the smaller children! Ralph used to tell his brothers that he could not think of anything in this world that would make him so happy as to be able some day to buy a house for his dear mother and to see her living easily.
The other boys,—Waldo, Charles, Buckley, and Edward,—proved to be fine scholars, like Ralph, but they were never strong.They were always having to hurry south, or across the ocean to get over some illness. The truth is they did not have enough to eat when they were little. Old maid aunts can tell stories of heroes every night in the year, but that will never take the place of bread and potatoes, eggs and milk.
Ralph's mother was very happy that he became a minister, and like his father, preached in Boston. After some years of preaching, he traveled in Europe. Then he lectured. He had a beautiful, clear voice, and all the things he told were so interesting that his name became famous, even before he wrote books. He settled in Concord, where Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott lived. He knew so much that by and by people called him "The Sage of Concord." He said he could never think very well sitting down. So when he wanted to write a poem, or sermon, or essay, (and you can hardly step into a New England home where there is not a book calledEmerson's Essays) he put on his hat and went out for a walk. When he had walked three or four hours, he had usuallydecided just what he wanted to write down. On this account he generally went out alone. It was after a stroll in the woods near Concord, where the squirrels are thick, that he wrote the fable about the mountain and the squirrel. It begins this way:
"The Mountain and the SquirrelHad a quarrel.The Mountain called the Squirrel 'Little Prig'—"
"The Mountain and the SquirrelHad a quarrel.The Mountain called the Squirrel 'Little Prig'—"
He generally went out alone. Page 221.He generally went out alone. Page 221.
It is rather nice to remember that after William Emerson had sold his bass viol, after all the pinching and saving of Mrs. William, and after going with half a coat, Ralph Waldo Emerson proved, in the end, to be such an uncommon man and scholar that his name is known the world over. Perhaps if all of us were as willing to study and work, and to keep studying and working, as the Sage of Concord was, there would be ever so many more famous Americans than there are to-day.
When Jane Addams was a little girl about seven years old, out in Cedarville, Illinois, her father used to wonder why she got up in the morning so much earlier than the other children. She explained to him politely that it was because she had so much to do. Her mother was dead, but her father looked after the children very carefully, and to make sure that Jane read something besides fairy stories, gave her five cents every time she could tell him about a new hero fromPlutarch's Livesand fifteen cents for every volume of Irving'sLife of Washington. She would have read what he asked her to without a cent of pay, for she almost worshiped him. He was tall and handsome and a man of great importance in the west. Jane was very proud of him, and as she was plain, toed in when she walked, and had rather a crooked back, she imagined that he must really be ashamed ofher, only he was too kind to say so. So she tried to keep out of his way.
The Honorable John Addams (her father) taught a Bible class in Sunday-school, and Jane was so afraid it would mortify him if she walked home with him that she always ran ahead with an uncle, urging him to hurry. "My," she used to say, "he would be too ashamed to hold his head up again, if I should speak to him on the street." No one knew she felt this way, and she had been dodging him some years when one morning, over in the neighboring town, she saw him coming down the steps of a bank building across the street from her. There was no place to hide, so she stood there blushing and breathing pretty hard. But he lifted his tall silk hat to her, smiled, and waved his hand. He looked so pleased to see her that she never worried any more about meeting him on the street.
Across the road from Jane's house was a nice green common, and beyond this a narrow path led to her father's mills. He owned two, a flour-mill and a sawmill. In the sawmill great trees from the Illinois forests weresawed into lumber. Jane used to sit on a log that was every minute being drawn nearer the great teeth of the saw and jump off it when she was within a few inches of the saw.
Jane and the other children had great fun in the flour-mill, too. They made believe the bins were houses, and down in the basement played on the tall piles of bran and shorts as they would on sand piles.
Jane's home was pretty and all the stores where she bought candy and toys were fascinating places. She fancied the whole world was pleasant and gay. She supposed that everybody in Cedarville had as good a home as she, until one day she went down in the part of the town where the mill hands lived. There the houses were shabby and untidy, the children ragged and dirty. They looked hungry, too. Jane ran home, and when her father came to dinner she asked him why any one had to live in such a pitiful way. He could not explain it so that she felt any better about it. "When I grow up," she declared, "I will build a lovely house right in the middle of those poor huts, so that thechildren may have something beautiful to look at; and I will see that they have clean clothes and good food."
Only a few Sundays later Jane dashed into her father's room ready for church. "See my new cloak," she called, "isn't it handsome?"
Her father admired it and then answered: "Yes, it is so much nicer than any other girl has that it may make some of the poorer ones unhappy. Perhaps you had better wear your old one."
Jane was a child that could not bear to hurt another's feelings, so she hung the new coat away and wore the other. But as she walked to church, she asked her father why every child could not have the same kind of things. He told her probably there would always be a difference in the clothing families wore, but in religion and education there was no reason why all should not have equal chances. "And, Jane dear," he added, "I think it is a mistake ever to make other people unhappy by dressing too much."
Jane never dropped her plan to have a fine house in the midst of poor ones. The backgave her a good deal of trouble as she grew older, and sometimes she had to lie still in bed for a year at a time. But she managed to fit for college and to graduate. Then she traveled abroad. But never for a day had she given up that house she had planned when she was a child of seven.
Jane started to study medicine but was not strong enough to become a doctor. So she traveled some more, but she could never find a city where poor people were not suffering. It saddened her, and she said: "I can't wait any longer. I must have a few people made happy." So with a girl friend she went to the big city of Chicago and hired a fine old house that had been built by a millionaire, a Mr. Hull. This house had a wide hall, open fireplaces, a lot of windows for the sun to stream through, and was on Halstead Street. This street is thirty-two miles long, and in it live people from about every country in the world.
Jane Addams made the house so cheerful and pretty that it was a joy to peep into it. Miss Addams and her friend asked the peopleabout there to come in and have coffee and cocoa, read books aloud to them, taught the poor children to sew and cook, visited the sick, and made them understand—all these poor, tired, discouraged people—that at Hull House there were friends who wanted to help them in every way.
By and by there were clubs for boys at Hull House, kindergartens for children, parties for old folks, and Halstead Street began to look cleaner, for Miss Addams went up and down those thirty-two miles of street and made it understood that she was there to help people grow healthy and clean. All the time, she was helping to nurse the sick and urging the rich people at their end of the city to come down to Halstead Street to see how the poor lived. At Hull House an idiot child or a drunken woman was helped as quickly and willingly as if they had been a clean member of the royal family.
The more Miss Addams found out about what goes on in big cities, the harder she worked. She remembered what her father said about every one in this world deservingan equal chance, and she tried to help factory workers, mill hands, girls and boys who had done wrong, ignorant mothers who did not know how to keep house and take care of their children, men who were out of work, and the blind and crippled.
Miss Addams's work set other people to thinking, and to-day there is hardly a large city but has built a handsome house down in the slums which offers help and comfort to the poor. But Hull House is the leading settlement house in the United States.
Jane Addams still dresses simply. She does not care to have the best clothes in the neighborhood, or jewels, or luxuries for herself. She does not believe in talking a great deal about what she intends to do later on. She has found that the world needs busy workers more than ready talkers. She is a busy, good woman who has done noble work in America. She is still getting up very early in the morning, and I fancy that when she is asked why she rests so little, she gives the same polite answer that her father heard: "Because I have so much to do!"
A few years ago every one who went to California tried to see Luther Burbank, for the newspapers and magazines were filled with stories of the wonderful things he was doing. Plenty of men make houses, automobiles, ships to go on the water, and ships that sail through the air, clothing, and toys, but this man makes new fruits and flowers. It is not an easy thing to do, and Mr. Burbank has found that he needs all his strength and time for his work. So now, at his small farm at Santa Rosa and at his big farm at Sebastopol, strangers find a sign like this:
ALL VISITORS ARE LIMITEDTO FIVE MINUTES EACH UNLESSBY SPECIAL APPOINTMENT
And during the six busiest months of the year, from April to October, other signs tell that itwill cost ten dollars to stay one hour. These signs are not put up because Mr. Burbank is cross or rude, but because these strange new plants have to be watched as carefully as tiny babies. He can't leave them for visitors.
Luther Burbank was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts. When he was a baby in his cradle, his mother and sisters found that nothing made him dimple and crow with delight like a flower. They noticed, too, that he never crushed a flower, and once, when a petal fell off a flower he was holding, he tried for hours with his tiny fingers to put it back in place. And when he was big enough to run about the house and yard, instead of carrying a toy or a dog or cat in his arms, he was usually hugging a potted plant of some kind, for as people saw his great love for such things, they were on the lookout for cunning plants for the dear little Burbank boy.
One day Luther was trudging across the yard, clasping a small lobster-cactus in an earthen pot, when he stumbled and fell, breaking the pot and plant. He cried for days over the accident.
At school, Luther was a delight to his teachers. There were few black marks against his name. He liked all his lessons, but the books that told him about birds, trees, and flowers pleased him most.
When Luther was old enough to go to Leicester Academy, he had for his dearest chum a boy cousin who knew Agassiz, and who through him became interested in science. This boy wanted to study about rocks and caves, rivers and fish, while Luther watched the birds that perched on the rocks and the trees that grew near the rivers. But the two spent many weeks tramping over the country together.
Luther worked several summers in a factory near his home. He was quick to understand machinery and invented a machine that saved the manager of the factory a great deal of money, for it would do the work of six men. Luther's family and friends were sure he would be an inventor. But he himself wanted to raise flowers.
Luther saved a little money and started a vegetable garden. He tried experimentswith the potato plants until he raised an entirely different kind than had ever grown before. Of course this made him want to experiment with other plants, and he stayed in the hot sun so much looking after them that he had a bad sunstroke. This led to his going to a climate where he might live outdoors during more months of the year, and where he would not be apt to have such attacks.
When Luther reached California, he had only a few dollars, rather poor health, and was among strangers. He tried to get work on farms or orchards, because he wanted to experiment with vines and vegetables. But if he got work, it was usually for only a few days at a time. Finally he was obliged to work on a chicken ranch, where the only place for him to sleep was in one of the chicken coops. The pay was small, and he did not have as much or as good food as some pet dogs get. But all the time he was saying to himself: "If I can have patience, I shall yet get a farm of my own."
By and by he was hired to look after a small nursery (this is what a big plantation of treesis called). He would have been perfectly happy there if sleeping in a damp room had not given him a fever. He was poor, sick, and almost alone, but not quite, for a very poor woman, who had only the milk of one cow to sell, found him one day lying on a bed of straw, and ever after that insisted on his drinking a pint of her milk each day. He declared that this milk saved his life.
For some years Luther took one odd job after another until he saved enough to buy a small piece of ground. Then he was soon raising plants and making new varieties. He read and studied and tried experiments. Sometimes he failed, and even when he succeeded there was a good deal of fun made of him. Some people thought Luther Burbank was crazy. It seemed such an odd thing for a man to think of doing—making a fruit or a flower that had not been heard of or dreamed of before! But he did not pay any heed to all this sneering. He worked harder than ever. And before long, the first new plants were in great demand, so that by selling them he got money to buy more land. To-daysome of the largest orchards in California are growing from one of Luther Burbank's experiments. And our country is millions of dollars richer from his new kinds of plums, potatoes, and prunes.
Mr. Burbank bought acres of land, hired armies of workmen, denied himself pleasures and visitors, and did not mind how tired he was, so long as old plants were being made better, or new plants were being created. Pretty soon letters began to come from Russia, France, Japan, England, South America, and Africa, asking for some Burbank plants and some Burbank advice as to their care.
Mr. Burbank has made more new forms of plant life than any other man. He has worked on two thousand, five hundred species of plants. Besides making flowers more beautiful and of sweeter fragrance, he has done wonders with the cactus plants that grow on prairies. Once all these plants were covered with thorns and prickles, so that the cattle who bit into them rushed away with bleeding mouths, feeling much the same as we should if we put our teeth into a stalk of celery andbit on to fish-hooks and needles. Well, Mr. Burbank has changed all that. The fruit of some of his cactus plants is almost as sweet as oranges; the thorns are all gone so that the stalks are fine food for cattle; some of the leaves make good pickles or greens; and the small plants are used for hedges. So the plants that were in old times a pest and nuisance are to-day, thanks to Mr. Burbank, a comfort to the world.
Luther Burbank is a handsome, courteous gentleman, fond of fun, of young people and children, but you can see how busy he has been in the odd science of making new plants and trees, and as he has plans for a great many more, you will also understand why he really has to have those signs put up around his farm at Santa Rosa.
On a lovely Sunday morning, some years ago, when all the sweet June smells came in through the open church window, an old man with silvery white hair played such a soft, entrancing little air on the organ, as the ushers took the weekly offering, that the listeners held their breath. "What is it?" they whispered. "What is the dainty thing called?" They asked the organist at the close of the service, and he answered: "That was MacDowell's 'To a Wild Rose'—and MacDowell is a composer of whom America may well be proud."
Edward MacDowell was born in New York. He had his first piano lessons when he was eight years old. But as soon as he had learned the notes, his mother noticed that it was not exercises that he played, but merry, rollicking airs. When she asked him where he found them, he replied: "In my head andheart." He was even then composing music of his own. His mother did not run to the neighbors at once, crying "My son is a genius." Instead of that she thought: "Dear me, I am afraid Edward will be a Jack-of-all-trades and good at none, for he writes beautiful stories and poems and draws exact likenesses of people. What in the world shall we do with him?"
All his music teachers said it would be wicked not to keep him at the piano. But that was easier said than done. When, at the age of fifteen, he went with his mother to Paris, he passed fine examinations for entrance to the French Conservatory and learned the French language in no time, so as to understand the teachers and lecturers. But he was still apt to forget that he went to his classes to listen and spent much time sketching the faces of teacher or pupils on the margin of his note-book. MacDowell was busy one day, over a picture of a teacher who had a large, queerly shaped nose, when the teacher, seeing that the boy was paying no attention to the lesson, darted to his seat and seized the sketch.MacDowell was frightened and imagined he would be punished. But the teacher was not a bit angry when he saw how true the lines were. He asked to keep the paper and a few days later called on Mrs. MacDowell. "Madam," he said, "I have shown the picture your son drew of me to an artist of the School of Fine Arts, and this gentleman is so sure Edward is meant for a portrait painter that he offers to pay all his expenses for three years and to give him lessons free of charge." This was a grand chance for a poor boy. Mrs. MacDowell did not want to make any mistake. She looked at the teacher a minute and asked: "What wouldyoudo?"
"Why, I am sure he will make a famous piano player."
There was the same old tiresome question: if Edward could do three or four things well, how was any one to know which he might do best?
Finally the matter was left to Edward. After a good many days of thinking, he decided his life should be given to music. Art was given up, and Edward promised to wasteno more time on his drawing. But he was a great reader and liked good books to the end of his days.
After study of the piano in Paris, MacDowell went to Frankfort for two years. He had many pupils there, and to one of them he was married.
The young married couple crossed the ocean and stayed in Boston long enough for MacDowell to give some concerts. His fingers were like velvet on the keys of the piano, and every one declared he must take part in a grand American concert that was to be given during the Paris Exposition. He did as he was asked, and the French people waved their handkerchiefs and cried in their language: "Good for the little American!" The French people invited him everywhere and begged him to remain in Paris, but from first to last Edward MacDowell was a loyal American, and he returned to Boston, where for eight years he played in concerts, took pupils, and best of all wrote much of the music which makes Americans so proud of him. He became a professor of music in ColumbiaCollege, and his piano pieces were played the world over.
Many men who write music try to give it a style like some old Italian or German composer, but MacDowell's music does not remind one of any German, Italian, or French writers; it is just itself—it is MacDowell. Some of his music is heavy and grand, but more of it is delicate. It was wonderful to hear MacDowell himself play "To a Wild Rose." A friend who knew how much the composer liked that said once: "Mac, something dreadful happened a few weeks ago. I heard your 'Wild Rose' played at a high school graduation, on a high school piano, by a high school girl—awful!"
MacDowell laughed and answered: "I suppose she pulled it up by the roots, didn't she?"
MacDowell loved outdoor life, and after he bought a farm at Peterboro, New Hampshire, he built a log cabin way off in the woods, had a grand piano carried there, and in the quiet of that forest wrote some of his sweetest musical sketches.
The names of MacDowell's compositions show he loved life under the sky. There are "The Woodland Sketches", "Sea Pieces", "From a Log Cabin", and single titles like "The Eagle", "A Water Lily", and "The Bars at Sunset."
MacDowell worked too steadily and died when he was quite young, but he had written enough music to be remembered as a great American composer. He said any man who wanted to write music that described his country must love that country so well that he would put into his notes what the nation had put into its life. He felt that America was a happy, brave, hopeful nation, and he tried to make his music show that.
MacDowell was shy and modest and was quite surprised when different colleges made him a Doctor of Music, when great concert players meekly asked him if they played his sonatas as he wished them played, and when medals and jewels were sent him as gifts.
A good many studios are now built near MacDowell's log cabin in Peterboro, and musicians and authors stay in the forestthrough the summer months, liking the quiet spot and hoping the sight of his log cabin may make them work as faithfully for the glory of America as Edward MacDowell did.
Even the French artist who wished to make a portrait painter of him must have been glad that MacDowell clung to music, and Mrs. MacDowell found that her Jack-of-all-trades was really master of one.
If ever there was a busy boy, Thomas Edison, who was born in Milan, Ohio, was one. He wanted to do everything that he saw others doing, and more than that, he liked to contrive new ways of doing things. The grown-up people wished he would not ask so many questions or stay always at their elbows, watching their work. But it came out all right in the end, these busy ways of his, for to-day he is one of the world's greatest inventors.
Thomas was a sunny, laughing, little boy, and pretty, too, except when he was trying to think how something was made; then he would scowl and pucker up his mouth until you would hardly know him. He always wanted to know how machinery worked and asked his father, or any one near by, to explain it to him. Sometimes his father would get all tired out answering questions, and toget rid of the little chap would say: "I don't know." Then Thomas would stare at his father and say: "You don't know!Whydon't you know?" Then, if Mr. Edison did not answer, Thomas would perhaps run down by the water, along the tow-path for the canal.
There were shipyards by the water, and he would pick up the different tools and ask the workmen what the name of each was, how it was used and why it was used, and get in their way generally until they drove him home. He built fine houses and tiny villages, with plank sidewalks, from the bits of wood these ship-builders gave him. The belts and wheels in the saw and grist mills pleased him. He watched them often. Once, in one of the mills, he fell into a pile of wheat in a grain elevator and had nearly smothered before he was found. Several times he fell into the canal and came near drowning.
When Thomas was six years old, he watched a goose sitting on her eggs and saw them hatch. He wanted to understand this strange thing better, so he gathered all the gooseand hen's eggs he could and made a big nest in his father's barn. Then all of a sudden, he was missing. The family rushed to the canal, the village, and the mills, and finally found him sitting on the nest of eggs in the barn. He wanted to see if he could hatch those eggs out!
The only person who did not get out of patience with Thomas was his mother. He and she adored each other. She had been a school teacher and was used to children. She saw that Thomas had a keen mind and was always ready to explain things to him. When he went to school, the teacher did not know what to make of his strange remarks and almost broke Thomas's heart one day by telling the principal that she thought the little Edison boy was "addled." Thomas ran home crying. He could not bear to go again to the school, so his mother taught him at home. He had a wonderful memory and must have paid close attention to what was said, for he never had to be told a thing the second time. Thomas quite often had his lessons with his mother on the piazza. They seemed so happythat the children who went to school often wished they could study with Mrs. Edison. She was fond of children and was apt to run down to the gate with some cookies or apples for them.
Sunny days Thomas liked to go with his father and mother into a tower Mr. Edison had built near the house. It was eighty feet high, and from its top one could see the broad river and hills beyond.
At the age of nine, Thomas was more fond of reading than of playing. When he was twelve, he got the notion in his head that it would be a fine thing to read every book that was in the Public Library in Detroit. He kept at it for months! But when he had read every book on the first fifteen feet of shelves, he saw that some were very dry and stupid and gave up his plan. After that he chose the books that told of interesting things.
When Thomas was eleven, he felt he ought to be doing something besides reading. He wanted to earn some money. His mother did not agree with him, but after he had teased for whole weeks, she said: "Well,you may try working part of each day." He sold papers and candy on the trains running between Port Huron and Detroit. At first Mrs. Edison was very nervous. She imagined that perhaps his train was getting wrecked, that he had fallen under the wheels of the engine, and all sorts of horrid things, but as he kept coming back home every night, safe and happy, she stopped worrying. He was bright, and the men who talked and laughed with him paid him a good deal of money for the papers and the nuts and candies which he carried in a basket. He was a proud boy to hand over to his mother the earnings of a week, which sometimes counted up to twenty dollars.
Thomas was such a very busy person that the lessons he had with his mother early in the mornings and his paper work on the train were not enough to satisfy him, so he bought some old type, a printing-press, and some ink rollers, and began making a little newspaper of his own. This newspaper was only the size of a lady's pocket-handkerchief, but it was so clever that he soon had five hundred subscribers, and he made ten more dollars a week on that. The great English engineer, Stephenson, was traveling on Thomas's train one day and was so pleased with the paper that he bought a thousand copies. He said there were many newspapers edited by grown-up men that were not one half as good. Remember about this paper, and if ever you see Thomas Edison's beautiful home at Orange, New Jersey, ask to look at a copy of it. Mr. Edison thinks as much of it as of anything in the fine library.
Well, Thomas's business on the trains grew so that he had to hire four boys to help him. Then he bought some chemicals, and in one corner of the baggage car, in spare moments, he began trying experiments. He was just getting hold of some pretty exciting ideas, when one day the train ran over something rough and spilled a bottle that held phosphorus. This set the woodwork on fire, and while poor Thomas was trying to beat out the flames, the conductor, in a rage, threw boy, press, bottles, and all off the train. And that was the end of the newspaper.
The next thing to interest Thomas was the system of telegraphing. He had not lost the habit of asking questions and quizzed the operator at Mt. Clemens, Mr. McKenzie, every chance he had. As he stood on the station platform one day, asking Mr. McKenzie something, he noticed the operator's little child playing on the tracks right in front of a coming train. And that train was an express! Thomas rushed out and seized the child just as the train almost touched his coat. Mr. McKenzie was so grateful that he said: "Look here, I want to do something for you. Let me teach you to be a telegraph operator." Thomas was delighted and after that used to take four lessons a week. At the end of three months he was an expert.
Thomas could not have learned so quickly if he had not worked very steadily. He always put his heart and mind on whatever he was learning, and he did not sleep more than four or five hours at night all the time he was studying the dots and dashes that are used in sending telegraph messages.
At the age of sixteen, Thomas Edison tookhis first position as telegraph operator. He did not earn very much at this work, at first, and usually tried to get places where he had night hours. This was so that he would have part of the daytime to read in public libraries and to try experiments. There were so many wonderful things to learn or to understand in this world that it was a pity, he thought, to waste much time in eating or sleeping.
When Thomas was twenty-two, he had made his ideas worth three hundred dollars a month. Probably the school teacher who thought the little Edison boy was "addled" never earned that much at any age! From that time until now Thomas Edison's experiments have meant a fortune to him and no end of pleasure and comfort to the world. You cannot go into a city in the United States that is not fitted with electric lights—Edisonlights. When you hear a phonograph, remember it is an Edison invention; when you go sight-seeing in a new city, the guide of the motor carriages will shout the names of places to you through a megaphone,—another Edison idea. He has patents on fourteenhundred ideas. No wonder he has had to keep busy! There is no telling how many more patents his brain will win, for he is only sixty-seven, and that is young in the Edison family. Thomas's great-grandfather lived to be a hundred and four, and his grandfather lived to be a hundred and two. And he himself is just as busy to-day as he was when he drove every one but his mother nearly crazy with his questions. Only to-day he stays in his workshop, getting answers to them.
He never loses his interest in telegraph matters; many of his inventions have been along that line. In fun, he called his first girl and boy "Dot" and "Dash." And in that fine home in New Jersey, hanging near the funny little newspaper, is a picture of Thomas Edison when he sold newspapers on the train and sent telegraph news about the great Civil War to all the stations along the way. The picture shows a bright, merry face. America's greatest inventor still laughs like a boy and takes a day off now and then for music, fishing, and reading. But he is the busiest man living.
Transcriber's noteThe following changes have been made to the text:Page 60: Was 'forget' (sheforgotto eat)Page 141: Was 'electrics' (electricor steam train)Page 206: Was 'forhead' (forehead)
The following changes have been made to the text:
Page 60: Was 'forget' (sheforgotto eat)
Page 141: Was 'electrics' (electricor steam train)
Page 206: Was 'forhead' (forehead)