well worth the telling as "another story," to use the Kipling
phrase. Of him Edison says: "Adams was one of a class of operators never
satisfied to work at any place for any great length of time. He had the
'wanderlust.' After enjoying hospitality in Boston in 1868-69, on the
floor of my hall-bedroom, which was a paradise for the entomologist,
while the boarding-house itself was run on the banting system of flesh
reduction, he came to me one day and said: 'Good-bye, Edison; I have
got sixty cents, and I am going to San Francisco.' And he did go. How, I
never knew personally. I learned afterward that he got a job there, and
then within a week they had a telegraphers' strike. He got a big
torch and sold patent medicine on the streets at night to support the
strikers. Then he went to Peru as partner of a man who had a grizzly
bear which they proposed entering against a bull in the bull-ring in
that city. The grizzly was killed in five minutes, and so the scheme
died. Then Adams crossed the Andes, and started a market-report
bureau in Buenos Ayres. This didn't pay, so he started a restaurant in
Pernambuco, Brazil. There he did very well, but something went wrong
(as it always does to a nomad), so he went to the Transvaal, and ran a
panorama called 'Paradise Lost' in the Kaffir kraals. This didn't pay,
and he became the editor of a newspaper; then went to England to raise
money for a railroad in Cape Colony. Next I heard of him in New York,
having just arrived from Bogota, United States of Colombia, with a power
of attorney and $2000 from a native of that republic, who had applied
for a patent for tightening a belt to prevent it from slipping on a
pulley--a device which he thought a new and great invention, but which
was in use ever since machinery was invented. I gave Adams, then, a
position as salesman for electrical apparatus. This he soon got tired
of, and I lost sight of him." Adams, in speaking of this episode, says
that when he asked for transportation expenses to St. Louis, Edison
pulled out of his pocket a ferry ticket to Hoboken, and said to his
associates: "I'll give him that, and he'll get there all right." This
was in the early days of electric lighting; but down to the present
moment the peregrinations of this versatile genius of the key have never
ceased in one hemisphere or the other, so that as Mr. Adams himself
remarked to the authors in April, 1908: "The life has been somewhat
variegated, but never dull."