in the ship-building
yards had an irresistible fascination. His questions were so ceaseless
and innumerable that the penetrating curiosity of an unusually strong
mind was regarded as deficiency in powers of comprehension, and the
father himself, a man of no mean ingenuity and ability, reports that
the child, although capable of reducing him to exhaustion by endless
inquiries, was often spoken of as rather wanting in ordinary acumen.
This apparent dulness is, however, a quite common incident to youthful
genius.

The constructive tendencies of this child of whom his father said once
that he had never had any boyhood days in the ordinary sense, were early
noted in his fondness for building little plank roads out of the debris
of the yards and mills. His extraordinarily retentive memory was shown
in his easy acquisition of all the songs of the lumber gangs and canal
men before he was five years old. One incident tells how he was found
one day in the village square copying laboriously the signs of the
stores. A highly characteristic event at the age of six is described by
his sister. He had noted a goose sitting on her eggs and the result. One
day soon after, he was missing. By-and-by, after an anxious search, his
father found him sitting in a nest he had made in the barn, filled with
goose-eggs and hens' eggs he had collected, trying to hatch them out.

One of Mr. Edison's most vivid recollections goes back to 1850, when as
a child three of four years old he saw camped in front of his home six
covered wagons, "prairie schooners," and witnessed their departure for
California. The great excitement over the gold discoveries was thus felt
in Milan, and these wagons, laden with all the worldly possessions of
their owners, were watched out of sight on their long journey by this
fascinated urchin, whose own discoveries in later years were to tempt
many other argonauts into the auriferous realms of electricity.

Another vivid memory of this period concerns his first realization
of the grim mystery of death. He went off one day with the son of
the wealthiest man in the town to bathe in the creek. Soon after they
entered the water the other boy disappeared. Young Edison waited around
the spot for half an hour or more, and then, as it was growing dark,
went home puzzled and lonely, but silent as to the occurrence. About two
hours afterward, when the missing boy was being searched for, a man came
to the Edison home to make anxious i