ial so unpromising.

Before he was twelve years old, the boy had found a place as newsboy
on the Grand Trunk Line running to Detroit. In the intervals between
his raids upon the helpless passengers with his newspapers,
periodicals, novels, and candies, he kept up the habit of reading,
and by practice acquired a remarkably clear and finished
handwriting. His next step was to secure the sole right of selling
newspapers on the train, and he soon had four boys under him to
assist him in the work. Having then bought a lot of old type from
some printing-office, he rigged up a rude frame in one of the
baggage-cars that served as a lumber-room, and then proceeded to set
up and print a newspaper which he called the _Grand Trunk Herald_,
and sold with the other newspapers. As he had no press, he was
obliged to take off the impressions by rubbing the paper on the
inked type with his hands. In some way, a copy of this newspaper
found its way to the _London Times_, and the editor spoke of it as
the only newspaper in the world printed on a moving train. During
the fighting at Pittsburgh Landing in 1862, Edison printed off
abstracts of the telegraphic news, and posted them up at the small
country stations, thus rendering a great service to the people
anxiously waiting for news from the field. The terminus of his train
was Detroit, and here, for the first time, he had access to a
library. In his enthusiasm at finding himself in virtual possession
of such a treasure, he determined, then and there, to read the whole
library through, as it stood, using his time between trains.
Beginning at one shelf he read fifteen feet in a line, going through
each book solidly from cover to cover. In this first bout, among
other books, he read Newton's "Principia," Ure's "Scientific
Dictionary," and Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy."

All this time, by hints and suggestions, Nature had been pushing the
youth toward the field he was finally to occupy almost by right of
eminent domain. As yet, telegraphy was in its infancy, and the
powers of electricity only beginning to be known. Edison had from
the first been interested in the workings of the telegraph line
along the railroad, and had made some experiments with a rude line
of his own, connecting his father's home at Port Huron--a village to
which the family had some time before removed from Milan--with the
house of a neighbor. To do this, he had to make a battery out of
odds and ends, old bottles, sto