ils around
him that he ventured to open an ambitious "School of Vocal Physiology,"
which became at once a profitable enterprise. For a time there seemed
to be little hope of his escaping from the burden of this success and
becoming an inventor, when, by a most happy coincidence, two of his
pupils brought to him exactly the sort of stimulation and practical help
that he needed and had not up to this time received.

One of these pupils was a little deaf-mute tot, five years of age, named
Georgie Sanders. Bell had agreed to give him a series of private lessons
for $350 a year; and as the child lived with his grandmother in the city
of Salem, sixteen miles from Boston, it was agreed that Bell should make
his home with the Sanders family. Here he not only found the keenest
interest and sympathy in his air-castles of invention, but also was
given permission to use the cellar of the house as his workshop.

For the next three years this cellar was his favorite retreat. He
littered it with tuning-forks, magnets, batteries, coils of wire, tin
trumpets, and cigar-boxes. No one outside of the Sanders family was
allowed to enter it, as Bell was nervously afraid of having his ideas
stolen. He would even go to five or six stores to buy his supplies, for
fear that his intentions should be discovered. Almost with the secrecy
of a conspirator, he worked alone in this cellar, usually at night, and
quite oblivious of the fact that sleep was a necessity to him and to the
Sanders family.

"Often in the middle of the night Bell would wake me up," said Thomas
Sanders, the father of Georgie. "His black eyes would be blazing with
excitement. Leaving me to go down to the cellar, he would rush wildly to
the barn and begin to send me signals along his experimental wires. If I
noticed any improvement in his machine, he would be delighted. He would
leap and whirl around in one of his `war-dances' and then go contentedly
to bed. But if the experiment was a failure, he would go back to his
workbench and try some different plan."

The second pupil who became a factor--a very considerable factor--in
Bell's career was a fifteen-year-old girl named Mabel Hubbard, who had
lost her hearing, and consequently her speech, through an attack of
scarlet-fever when a baby. She was a gentle and lovable girl, and Bell,
in his ardent and headlong way, lost his heart to her completely; and
four years later, he had the happiness of making her his wife. Mabel
Hubbard