see Thomas Edison's beautiful home at
Orange, New Jersey, ask to look at a copy of it. Mr. Edison thinks as
much of it as of anything in the fine library.

Well, Thomas's business on the trains grew so that he had to hire four
boys to help him. Then he bought some chemicals, and in one corner of
the baggage car, in spare moments, he began trying experiments. He was
just getting hold of some pretty exciting ideas, when one day the train
ran over something rough and spilled a bottle that held phosphorus. This
set the woodwork on fire, and while poor Thomas was trying to beat out
the flames, the conductor, in a rage, threw boy, press, bottles, and all
off the train. And that was the end of the newspaper.

The next thing to interest Thomas was the system of telegraphing. He had
not lost the habit of asking questions and quizzed the operator at Mt.
Clemens, Mr. McKenzie, every chance he had. As he stood on the station
platform one day, asking Mr. McKenzie something, he noticed the
operator's little child playing on the tracks right in front of a coming
train. And that train was an express! Thomas rushed out and seized the
child just as the train almost touched his coat. Mr. McKenzie was so
grateful that he said: "Look here, I want to do something for you. Let
me teach you to be a telegraph operator." Thomas was delighted and after
that used to take four lessons a week. At the end of three months he was
an expert.

Thomas could not have learned so quickly if he had not worked very
steadily. He always put his heart and mind on whatever he was learning,
and he did not sleep more than four or five hours at night all the time
he was studying the dots and dashes that are used in sending telegraph
messages.

At the age of sixteen, Thomas Edison took his first position as
telegraph operator. He did not earn very much at this work, at first,
and usually tried to get places where he had night hours. This was so
that he would have part of the daytime to read in public libraries and
to try experiments. There were so many wonderful things to learn or to
understand in this world that it was a pity, he thought, to waste much
time in eating or sleeping.

When Thomas was twenty-two, he had made his ideas worth three hundred
dollars a month. Probably the school teacher who thought the little
Edison boy was "addled" never earned that much at any age! From that
time until now Thomas Edison's experiments have meant a fortune to him
and no