r 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,