ad become evident, both to his parents and to his
friends, that young Graham was destined to become some sort of a
creative genius. He was tall and supple, with a pale complexion, large
nose, full lips, jet-black eyes, and jet-black hair, brushed high
and usually rumpled into a curly tangle. In temperament he was a true
scientific Bohemian, with the ideals of a savant and the disposition
of an artist. He was wholly a man of enthusiasms, more devoted to ideas
than to people; and less likely to master his own thoughts than to be
mastered by them. He had no shrewdness, in any commercial sense, and
very little knowledge of the small practical details of ordinary living.
He was always intense, always absorbed. When he applied his mind to a
problem, it became at once an enthralling arena, in which there went
whirling a chariot-race of ideas and inventive fancies.

He had been fascinated from boyhood by his father's system of "Visible
Speech." He knew it so well that he once astonished a professor of
Oriental languages by repeating correctly a sentence of Sanscrit that
had been written in "Visible Speech" characters. While he was living in
London his most absorbing enthusiasm was the instruction of a class of
deaf-mutes, who could be trained to talk, he believed, by means of the
"Visible Speech" alphabet. He was so deeply impressed by the progress
made by these pupils, and by the pathos of their dumbness, that when he
arrived in Canada he was in doubt as to which of these two tasks was the
more important--the teaching of deaf-mutes or the invention of a musical
telegraph.

At this point, and before Bell had begun to experiment with his
telegraph, the scene of the story shifts from Canada to Massachusetts.
It appears that his father, while lecturing in Boston, had mentioned
Graham's exploits with a class of deaf-mutes; and soon afterward the
Boston Board of Education wrote to Graham, offering him five hundred
dollars if he would come to Boston and introduce his system of teaching
in a school for deaf-mutes that had been opened recently. The young man
joyfully agreed, and on the first of April, 1871, crossed the line and
became for the remainder of his life an American.

For the next two years his telegraphic work was laid aside, if not
forgotten. His success as a teacher of deaf-mutes was sudden and
overwhelming. It was the educational sensation of 1871. It won him a
professorship in Boston University; and brought so many pup