"Oh, yes," replied Uncle John. "What I think is the most wonderful thing Edison has done is the phonograph. Next to the telephone, that to me is the biggest marvel in the world of science. Think, Dora, of speaking into a machine that makes a picture of the sound waves produced by your voice, and then, a day or a year or a century later, letting the instrument work backward and hearing your own voice exactly as it sounded at first. Such a mechanism almost frightens me. It makes me sure that if a man like Edison can keep the idle words men speak through centuries, the Master Mind of this universe can keep them for us forever." [Illustration: EDISON'S FIRST PHONOGRAPH.] Dora must have caught a little of her uncle's thought, for she said, slowly, "Do you mean that everything I say I shall hear again sometime?" "I don't know exactly, Dora. But I am sure that God, who gave you power to speak, knows how to keep your words forever; and I am sure you will never cease to be glad for all the kind words you may speak for human ears to hear. "But I'd almost forgotten about the electric light, Dora. Let me tell you what Edison said about that the last time I saw him. He told me of seeing in Philadelphia what is called an arc lamp--two pieces of carbon that electricity has heated white hot and that give off a powerful light, much more powerful than any gas lamp you ever saw could give. But a lamp like that, though it makes a fine street lamp, is not suitable for lighting a house. It's too bright and too big. Edison says it needs to be subdivided so that it can be distributed to houses just as gas is now. "That's Edison's present problem, Dora. He is such an untiring worker that I don't believe it will take many months; and when the process is perfected and the implements for generating the electricity can be secured, I mean to make my hotel the prettiest place at night on the Maine coast. But meantime, Dora, suppose you learn to wipe lamps so dry and polish chimneys so bright and trim wicks so even that every summer visitor at the 'Atlantic' will be glad to get away for a while from the flaring, ill-smelling, poisonous gas light." "I will, Uncle John, I will! I'll be the best lamp-trimmer on the whole Maine coast!" "That's the spirit that will take you to college, Dora," answered her uncle. "Don't lose a bit of it." PART II For all the long hot weeks of the next summer Dora worked faithfully every day on the hotel lamps. She had to be at her work at eight o'clock every morning, and she seldom finished before two in the afternoon. But every week her uncle paid her three dollars and a half, and by the end of the season she had forty-two dollars carefully put away. When the hotel closed, her uncle made her a present of eight dollars, so that when she started for school in the fall she rejoiced in the thought of fifty dollars put away in the savings bank as a college fund.