wing machine, or a grindstone, or a little lathe. Then he got
hold of a booklet about wireless telegraphy. There is something
thrilling about the idea which appeals to the imagination--the receiving
of mysterious messages from afar, through the air, and sending back from
your little instrument the far-flying answers.

At the age of twelve, this boy with the aid of a Japanese servant, had
set up his own aerial and apparatus, had learned the code alphabet and
was thoroughly familiar with all the delicate intricacies of detector,
tuning coil, sparker and the rest of it. He had gotten in touch with
certain other wireless operators within a radius of ten miles and,
although he had never seen any of them, he could recognize instantly the
sound of their different instruments and it was a joy and delight to
hold conversations with them and call them up for a good-night, before
he went to bed. And before he was thirteen, he undertook to construct
with his own hands a tuning coil which would be better for his purposes
than the kind he could afford to buy at the store. After much determined
effort, he succeeded and installed it and had the satisfaction of
finding that it was, indeed, decidedly better.

Another boy, who had never had to bother his head with school-books, but
who had also learned to read, in due time got started on a new interest
by a printing-press, which was given to him for Christmas. He puzzled
with it and worked over it, until he learned to set up type and operate
it very nicely. Then he began printing visiting cards--first for
himself, then mother and father, then the servants and friends. It was
great fun to take orders from them and charge them ten cents a dozen,
in a business-like way. Next he got a larger press and different kinds
of type, and by dint of perseverance he found among the trades-people a
few kindly souls, who allowed him to print their business cards for them
at so much a hundred.

Out of this interest grew a more ambitious one. How fine it would be to
print and publish a little newspaper, with stories and verses and
advertisements and subscriptions and everything! This appealed to the
imagination and became an absorbing ambition. In this particular case,
the newspaper project soon outdistanced the printing press. The
newspaper must be bigger and finer than a press of that kind could
possibly manage. So the boy went to a regular printer and found out
about the cost and details of publishing