satisfy his family, and though he
was of frail physique his mother apprenticed him to a blacksmith.

"I was put to work at once on the anvil," he says, "and before the day was
over my right hand was so blistered that I had to open its fingers with my
left hand, and detach them from the handle of the sledge hammer that I
wielded."

He was eighteen years old when he was sent to work in an iron foundry, and
he remained at this occupation several years, studying and writing
incessantly at night. One poem, "Ode on a Grecian Flute," was accepted by
the _Broadway Journal_, a little weekly edited by Edgar Allan Poe. Later
the originality of the poem was doubted. Stoddard went to assure Poe that
it was original. He found him asleep in an office chair. On being
awakened and told by Stoddard that the poem was original, Poe jumped up
and yelled:

"You lie! Get out before I throw you out."

Stoddard fled, and the poem was not published. The last glimpse he ever
had of Poe was one cold and stormy autumn day. Stoddard was hurrying along
Broadway, well sheltered by an umbrella, when he noticed Poe, thinly clad,
crouching against the side of a building in an attempt to find refuge from
the storm. Stoddard walked around the corner and paused. He wanted to go
back and offer Poe the shelter of his umbrella, but he did not dare. The
following summer Poe died in Baltimore. Afterward Stoddard wrote the first
genuinely fair and appreciative life of him.

A MIGHTY ELECTRICIAN.

Steinmetz Is Not Yet Forty Years Old and
Has Taken Out Over One Hundred
Patents.

Charles P. Steinmetz, chief expert at the Schenectady Electrical Works,
was born in Breslau, Germany. Though he is only forty years old, he has
already taken out more than one hundred patents for electrical devices,
and some of these are of immense value.

His father was a railroad employee, and on German railroads the pay is
small and the duties exacting. But the father managed to send his son to
the University of Breslau, and here he distinguished himself in
mathematics and chemistry, and spent his leisure time in chemical and
mechanical experiments at home.

At that time the German government was making an effort to stamp out
socialism, and laws of unusual severity were passed against those who
advocated it. Bismarck, who headed the anti-socialist movement, saw to it
that the laws were vigorously enforced. The natural result was a reaction
against the conduct of the