which was absolutely nothing more nor less
than my exact invention. But no mention was made of the fact that, just
previously, he had seen the whole of my apparatus. Adams stayed over in
Europe connected with the telephone for several years, and finally died
of too much whiskey--but not of heart-disease. This shows how whiskey
is the more dangerous of the two.

"Adams said that at one time he was aboard a coffee-ship in the harbor
of Santos, Brazil. He fell down a hatchway and broke his arm. They took
him up to the hospital--a Portuguese one--where he could not speak the
language, and they did not understand English. They treated him for two
weeks for yellow fever! He was certainly the most profane man we ever
had around the laboratory. He stood high in his class."

And there were others of a different stripe. "We had a man with us at
Menlo called Segredor. He was a queer kind of fellow. The men got in the
habit of plaguing him; and, finally, one day he said to the assembled
experimenters in the top room of the laboratory: 'The next man that does
it, I will kill him.' They paid no attention to this, and next day one
of them made some sarcastic remark to him. Segredor made a start for
his boarding-house, and when they saw him coming back up the hill with
a gun, they knew there would be trouble, so they all made for the woods.
One of the men went back and mollified him. He returned to his work;
but he was not teased any more. At last, when I sent men out hunting for
bamboo, I dispatched Segredor to Cuba. He arrived in Havana on Tuesday,
and on the Friday following he was buried, having died of the black
vomit. On the receipt of the news of his death, half a dozen of the men
wanted his job, but my searcher in the Astor Library reported that the
chances of finding the right kind of bamboo for lamps in Cuba were very
small; so I did not send a substitute."

Another thumb-nail sketch made of one of his associates is this: "When
experimenting with vacuum-pumps to exhaust the incandescent lamps, I
required some very delicate and close manipulation of glass, and hired
a German glass-blower who was said to be the most expert man of his
kind in the United States. He was the only one who could make clinical
thermometers. He was the most extraordinarily conceited man I have ever
come across. His conceit was so enormous, life was made a burden to him
by all the boys around the laboratory. He once said that he was educated
in a univ