Finally he reached Port Huron. The station was a mile from town. Edison seized his papers. He met the crowd coming just as he reached a church where a prayer meeting was being held. The prayer meeting broke up, and though he raised his price to twenty-five cents he "took in a young fortune." [Sidenote: =Experimenting in electricity=] Edison began very early to make experiments in electricity. After rigging up a line at home, hitching the wire to the legs of a cat, and rubbing the cat's back vigorously, he saw the failure of his first experiment--the cat would not stand! [Sidenote: =Saves a life and receives lessons in telegraphy=] At Mt. Clemens, one day, young Edison saw a child playing on the railroad with its back to an on-coming freight train. He dashed at the child, and both tumbled to the ground at the roadside. For this act of bravery the telegraph operator gave him lessons in telegraphy. [Sidenote: =Makes a set of telegraphic instruments=] [Sidenote: =Becomes a tramp telegrapher=] =200. Begins to Study Electricity.= He studied ten days, then disappeared. He returned with a complete set of telegraphic instruments made by his own hand! After his trade was learned he began a period of wandering as a telegraph operator. For many boys still in their teens this would have been a time of destruction, but Edison neither drank nor smoked. He wandered from Adrian to Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Memphis, and Boston, stopping for shorter or longer periods at each place. [Illustration: THOMAS ALVA EDISON _After a photograph from life_] By the time he was twenty-two he had invented and partly finished his plan of sending two dispatches along the same wire at the same time. This was equal to doubling the number of wires in use. [Sidenote: =Repairs electric machinery and gains a situation=] Edison was a poor boy and was two or three hundred dollars in debt. He went from Boston to New York. The speculators in Wall Street were wild with excitement, for the electric machinery had broken down. Nobody could make it work. Edison pushed his way to the front, saw the difficulty, and at once removed it. All were loud in their praise of Edison. On the next day he was engaged to take charge of all the electric machinery at three hundred dollars per month. [Sidenote: =Receives forty thousand dollars for his inventions=] After a time he joined a company and gave his time to working out inventions. The company finally sent a number of men to ask Edison how much he would take for his inventions. He had already decided to say five thousand dollars. But when the men came he said that he did not know. He was dumfounded when they offered him forty thousand dollars! [Sidenote: =Establishes his first workshop=]