clearness, each letter being distinctly formed, with little or no
shading.

His comrades were no better than before. On returning from his work in
the small hours, Edison would sometimes find two or three of them asleep
in his bed with their boots on, and have to shift them to the floor in
order that he might 'turn in.'

A new office was opened, but strict orders were issued that nobody was
to interfere with the instruments and their connections. He could
not resist the infringement of this rule, however, and continued his
experiments.

In drawing some vitriol one night, he upset the carboy, and the acid
eating its way through the floor, played havoc with the furniture of a
luxurious bank in the flat below. He was discharged for this, but soon
obtained another engagement as a press operator in Cincinnati. He spent
his leisure in the Mechanics' Library, studying works on electricity and
general science. He also developed his ideas on the duplex system;
and if they were not carried out, they at least directed him to the
quadruplex system with which his name was afterwards associated.

These attempts to improve his time seem to have made him unpopular, for
after a short term in Cincinnati, he returned to Port Huron. A friend,
Mr. F. Adams, operator in the Boston office of the Western Union
Telegraph Company, recommended Edison to his manager, Mr. G. F.
Milliken, as a good man to work the New York wire, and the berth was
offered to Edison by telegraph. He accepted, and left at once for Boston
by the Grand Trunk Railway, but the train was snowed up for two days
near the bluffs of the St. Lawrence. The consequence might have been
serious had provisions not been found by a party of foragers.

Mr. Milliken was the first of Edison's masters, and perhaps his fellows,
who appreciated him. Mediocrity had only seen the gawky stripling, with
his moonstruck air, and pestilent habit of trying some new crotchet.
Himself an inventor, Milliken recognised in his deep-set eye and musing
brow the fire of a suppressed genius. He was then just twenty-one. The
friendship of Mr. Milliken, and the opportunity for experiment, rendered
the Boston office a congenial one.

His by-hours were spent in a little workshop he had opened. Among his
inventions at this period were a dial telegraph, and a 'printer' for
use on private lines, and an electro-chemical vote recorder, which the
Legislature of Massachusetts declined to adopt. With the assista