ue, so sure of me; and I felt I had someone to live for, some one
I must not disappoint. The memory of her will always be a blessing to
me."

When young Edison was twelve years of age, he became a newsboy on the
Grand Trunk Railroad. That he was a wide-awake, energetic lad is shown
by the following experience as told by himself.

"At the beginning of the Civil War I was slaving late and early at
selling papers; but to tell the truth I was not making a fortune. I
worked on so small a margin that I had to be mighty careful not to
overload myself with papers that I could not sell. On the other hand,
I could not afford to carry so few that I found myself sold out long
before the end of the trip. To enable myself to hit the happy mean, I
found a plan which turned out admirably. I made a friend of one of the
compositors of the Free Press office, and persuaded him to show me
every day a galley-proof of the most important news articles. From a
study of its head-lines, I soon learned to gauge the value of the
day's news and its selling capacity, so that I could form a tolerably
correct estimate of the number of papers I should need. As a rule I
could dispose of about two hundred; but if there was any special news
from the seat of war, the sale ran up to three hundred or over.

"Well, one day my compositor brought me a proof-slip of which nearly
the whole was taken up with a gigantic display head. It was the first
report of the battle of Pittsburgh Landing--afterward called Shiloh,
you know, and it gave the number of killed and wounded as sixty
thousand men.

"I grasped the situation at once. Here was a chance for enormous
sales, if only the people along the line could know what had happened!
If only they could see the proof-slip I was then reading! Suddenly an
idea occurred to me. I rushed off to the telegraph operator and
gravely made a proposition to him which he received just as gravely.
He, on his part, was to wire to each of the principal stations on our
route, asking the station-master to chalk up on the bulletin-board,
used for announcing the time of arrival and departure of trains, the
news of the great battle, with its accompanying slaughter. This he was
to do at once, while I, in return, agreed to supply him with current
literature for nothing during the next six months from that date.

"This bargain struck, I began to bethink me how I was to get enough
papers to make the grand coup I intended. I had very little c