the new man.

"'Without suspecting what was up I sat down, and the New York man
started in very slowly. Soon he increased his speed and I easily adapted
my pace to his. This put the man on his mettle and he "laid in his best
licks," but soon reached his limit.

"'At this point I happened to look up and saw the operators all looking
over my shoulder with faces that seemed to expect something funny. Then
I knew they were playing a trick on me, but I didn't let on.

"'Before long the New York man began slurring his words, running them
together and sticking the signals; but I had been used to all that sort
of thing in taking reports, so I wasn't put out in the least. At last,
when I thought the joke had gone far enough, and as the special was
nearly finished, I calmly opened the key and remarked over the wire to
my New York rival:

"'Say, young man, change off and send with the other foot!'

"'This broke the fellow up so that he turned the job over to another
operator to finish, to the real discomfiture of the fellows around me.'

"Friend Adams goes on to tell of other happennings at the Hub:

"'One day Edison was more than delighted to pick up a complete set of
Faraday's works, bringing them home at 4 A.M. and reading steadily until
breakfast time, when he said, with great enthusiasm:

"'Adams, I have got so much to do and life is so short, _I am going to
hustle_!'"

"'Then he started off to breakfast on a dead run.'

"He soon opened a workshop in Boston and began making experiments. It
was here that he made a working model of his vote recorder, the first
invention he ever patented.

"Edison has told us of this trip to Washington and how he showed that
his invention could register the House vote, pro and con, almost
instantaneously. The chairman of the committee saw how quickly and
perfectly it worked and said to him:

"'Young man, if there is any invention on earth that we _don't_ want
down here, it is this. Filibustering on votes is one of the greatest
weapons in the hands of a minority to prevent bad legislation, and this
instrument would stop that.'

"The youth felt the force of this so much that he decided from that time
forth not to try to invent anything unless it would meet a genuine
demand,--not from a few, but many people.

"It was while in Boston that Edison grew weary of the monotonous life of
a telegraph operator and began to work up an independent business along
inventive lines, so that he r