husband's house, and so became convinced
that her boys were to become world famous. They came of very good stock,
and the family traced their ancestry back to the great Leif Ericsson,
son of Eric the Red, who had been the Norse discoverer of America.

Olof and his wife Brita were devoted to their children. Olof was part
owner of a mine at the town of Langsbaushyttan near which they lived.
The children had a governess for a time, and father and mother taught
them what they could, but the most of their days were spent playing in
the thick pine woods along the shore of the little Lake Hytt which lay
in front of their house. Sometimes Olof took the two boys with him to
the mine, and from almost the first visit a perfect passion for
machinery took possession of the younger boy John. After that he was
always playing with pencils and paper, with bits of wood and metal, and
spent hours drawing figures in the sand on the beach of the lake.

At about this period hard times befell Sweden. The small Northern
country, half the size of Texas, with fewer people than the single city
of London, never very rich, had trouble keeping her independence from
Russia. Her king was a weakling, and lost part of his land. Then a
gentleman of fortune, a man who had been a French lawyer's apprentice,
and had risen to be a marshal, one whose sword had helped to carve out
an empire for Napoleon, suddenly was elected King of Sweden. He brought
the little country French support and better times, but meantime Olof
Ericsson had lost his property and found that he must seek work at once
to keep his family from starving.

Olof had lost his share in the mine and had been living in the depths of
the pine forest choosing lumber for builders. He had encouraged his son
John's talent for machinery, and now began to believe that the old
prophecy might really come true. He had seen John, only ten years old,
build a miniature sawmill and pumping engine at the mine, and had been
as much astonished as any of the men there when his son proudly showed
them the designs he had drawn for a new kind of pump to drain the mines
of water.

Even when the little family had left the mining town and were living in
the deep woods the boy continued working out his own inventions. He made
tools for himself, using sharp pine needles for the points of a drawing
compass he fashioned out of sticks, begging his mother for a few hairs
from her fur coat to make paint brushes, and actual