on books or apparatus, when
the Memphis lines were transferred from the Government to a private
company and Edison was discharged, he found himself without a dollar.
Transported to Decatur, he walked to Nashville, where he found another
operator, William Foley, in the like straits, and they went in company
to Louisville. Foley's reputation as an operator was none of the best;
but on his recommendation Edison obtained a situation, and supported
Foley until he too got employment.

The squalid office was infested with rats, and its discipline was lax,
in all save speed and quality of work, and some of his companions were
of a dissipated stamp. To add to his discomforts, the line he worked was
old and defective; but he improved the signals by adjusting three sets
of instruments, and utilising them for three different states of
the line. During nearly two years of drudgery under these depressing
circumstances, Edison's prospects of becoming an inventor seemed further
off than ever. Perhaps he began to fear that stern necessity would
grind him down, and keep him struggling for a livelihood. None of his
improvements had brought him any advantage. His efforts to invent had
been ridiculed and discountenanced. Nobody had recognised his talent,
at least as a thing of value and worthy of encouragement, let alone
support. All his promotion had come from trying to excel in his routine
work. Perhaps he lost faith in himself, or it may be that the glowing
accounts he received of South America induced him to seek his fortune
there. At all events he caught the 'craze' for emigration that swept
the Southern States on the conclusion of the Civil War, and resolved to
emigrate with two companions, Keen and Warren.

But on their arriving at New Orleans the vessel had sailed. In this
predicament Edison fell in with a travelled Spaniard, who depicted the
inferiority of other countries, and especially of South America, in
such vivid colours, that he changed his intention and returned home
to Michigan. After a pleasant holiday with his friends he resumed his
occupation in the Louisville office.

Contact with home seems to have charged him with fresh courage. He wrote
a work on electricity, which for lack of means was never published, and
improved his penmanship until he could write a fair round backhand at
the rate of forty-five words a minute--that is to say, the utmost that
an operator can send by the Morse code. The style was chosen for its