, of Milan.
Having been told one day that a goose hatches her goslings by the warmth
of her body, the child was missed, and subsequently found in the barn
curled up in a nest beside a quantity of eggs!

The Lake Shore Railway having injured the trade of Milan, the family
removed to Port Huron, in Michigan, when Edison was about seven years
old. Here they lived in an old-fashioned white frame-house, surrounded
by a grove, and commanding a fine view of the broad river, with the
Canadian hills beyond. His mother undertook his education, and with
the exception of two months he never went to school. She directed his
opening mind to the acquisition of knowledge, and often read aloud to
the family in the evening. She and her son were a loving pair, and it
is pleasant to know that although she died on April 9, 1871, before he
finally emerged from his difficulties, her end was brightened by the
first rays of his coming glory.

Mr. Edison tells us that his son never had any boyhood in the ordinary
sense, his early playthings being steam-engines and the mechanical
powers. But it is like enough that he trapped a wood-chuck now and then,
or caught a white-fish with the rest.

He was greedy of knowledge, and by the age of ten had read the PENNY
ENCYCLOPAEDIA; Hume's HISTORY OF ENGLAND; Dubigne's HISTORY OF THE
REFORMATION; Gibbon's DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, and Sears'
HISTORY OF THE WORLD. His father, we are told, encouraged his love of
study by making him a small present for every book he read.

At the age of twelve he became a train-boy, or vendor of candy, fruit,
and journals to the passengers on the Grand Trunk Railway, between Port
Huron and Detroit. The post enabled him to sleep at home, and to extend
his reading by the public library at Detroit. Like the boy Ampere, he
proposed, it is said, to master the whole collection, shelf by shelf,
and worked his way through fifteen feet of the bottom one before he
began to select his fare.

Even the PRINCIPIA of Newton never daunted him; and if he did not
understand the problems which have puzzled some of the greatest
minds, he read them religiously, and pressed on. Burton's ANATOMY OF
MELANCHOLY, Ure's DICTIONARY OF CHEMISTRY, did not come amiss; but
in Victor Hugo's LES MISERABLES and THE TOILERS OF THE SEA he found
a treasure after his own heart. Like Ampere, too, he was noted for a
memory which retained many of the facts thus impressed upon it, as the
sounds are pr