nnesota. On these trains I employed a boy who sold bread, tobacco, and
stick candy. As the war progressed the daily newspaper sales became very
profitable, and I gave up the vegetable store."

The hours of this occupation were long, but the work was not
particularly heavy, and Edison soon found opportunity for his favorite
avocation--chemical experimentation. His train left Port Huron at 7
A.M., and made its southward trip to Detroit in about three hours. This
gave a stay in that city from 10 A.M. until the late afternoon, when the
train left, arriving at Port Huron about 9.30 P.M. The train was made up
of three coaches--baggage, smoking, and ordinary passenger or "ladies."
The baggage-car was divided into three compartments--one for trunks and
packages, one for the mail, and one for smoking. In those days no use
was made of the smoking-compartment, as there was no ventilation, and it
was turned over to young Edison, who not only kept papers there and his
stock of goods as a "candy butcher," but soon had it equipped with an
extraordinary variety of apparatus. There was plenty of leisure on the
two daily runs, even for an industrious boy, and thus he found time
to transfer his laboratory from the cellar and re-establish it on the
train.

His earnings were also excellent--so good, in fact, that eight or ten
dollars a day were often taken in, and one dollar went every day to his
mother. Thus supporting himself, he felt entitled to spend any other
profit left over on chemicals and apparatus. And spent it was, for with
access to Detroit and its large stores, where he bought his supplies,
and to the public library, where he could quench his thirst for
technical information, Edison gave up all his spare time and money to
chemistry. Surely the country could have presented at that moment no
more striking example of the passionate pursuit of knowledge under
difficulties than this newsboy, barely fourteen years of age, with his
jars and test-tubes installed on a railway baggage-car.

Nor did this amazing equipment stop at batteries and bottles. The same
little space a few feet square was soon converted by this precocious
youth into a newspaper office. The outbreak of the Civil War gave a
great stimulus to the demand for all newspapers, noticing which he
became ambitious to publish a local journal of his own, devoted to the
news of that section of the Grand Trunk road. A small printing-press
that had been used for hotel bills of