Its biggest 'sworn circulation' was 700 copies, of which
about 500 were _bona fide_ subscriptions, and the rest 'news-stand
sales.'

"The great English engineer, Robert Stephenson, grandson of the inventor
and improver of the locomotive, is said to have ordered a thousand
copies to be distributed on railways all over the world to show what an
American newsboy could do.

"Even the _London Times_, known for generations as '_The Thunderer_,'
and long considered the greatest newspaper in both hemispheres, quoted
from _The Weekly Herald_, as the only paper of its kind in the world.
Young Edison's news venture was a financial success, for it added $45.00
a month to his already large income.

"But _Paul Pry_ came to grief because he tried to be funny in disclosing
the secret motives of certain persons. People differ widely in their
notions about fun. In a local paper, too, some one's feelin's are likely
to get 'lacerated!' This was the case with a six-foot subscriber to the
paper which was published then under Al Edison's pen name of 'Paul Pry.'
One day the juvenile editor happened to meet his huge and wrathy reader
too near the St. Clair river. Whereupon the subscriber took the editor
by his collar and waistband and heaved him, neck and crop, into the
river. Edison swam to shore, wet, but otherwise undisturbed,
discontinued the publication of _Paul Pry_, and bade good-by to
journalism forever!

"While young Edison was wading through such mammoth works as Sears's
_History of the World_, Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and the
_Dictionary of Sciences_ (and had begun to wrestle desperately with
Newton's _Principia_!) he was showing a rare passion for chemistry. He
'annexed' the cellar for a laboratory. His mother said she counted, at
one time, no less than two hundred bottles of chemicals, all shrewdly
marked POISON, so that no one but himself would dare to touch them.
Before long the lad took up so much room in his mother's cellar with his
'mess,' as she called it, that she told him to take it out, 'bag and
baggage.'

"He once stated that his great desire to make money was largely because
he needed the cash to buy materials for experiments. Therefore, in this
emergency, he took keen pleasure in buying all the chemicals, appliances
and apparatus he wished, and installing them in his real 'bag and
baggage' car. As the railroad authorities had allowed him to set up a
printing press, in addition to his miscellaneous stock i