Finding an asylum in the basement of his father's house (where he took the precaution to label all his bottles 'poison'), he began the publication of a new and better journal, entitled the PAUL PRY. It boasted of several contributors and a list of regular subscribers. One of these (Mr. J.H.B.), while smarting under what he considered a malicious libel, met the editor one day on the brink of the St. Clair, and taking the law into his own hands, soused him in the river. The editor avenged his insulted dignity by excluding the subscriber's name from the pages of the PAUL PRY. Youthful genius is apt to prove unlucky, and another story (we hope they are all true, though we cannot vouch for them), is told of his partiality for riding with the engine-driver on the locomotive. After he had gained an insight into the working of the locomotive he would run the train himself; but on one occasion he pumped so much water into the boiler that it was shot from the funnel, and deluged the engine with soot. By using his eyes and haunting the machine shops he was able to construct a model of a locomotive. But his employment of the telegraph seems to have diverted his thoughts in that direction, and with the help of a book on the telegraph he erected a makeshift line between his new laboratory and the house of James Ward, one of his boy helpers. The conductor was run on trees, and insulated with bottles, and the apparatus was home-made, but it seems to have been of some use. Mr. James D. Reid, author of THE TELEGRAPH IN AMERICA, would have us believe that an attempt was made to utilise the electricity obtained by rubbing a cat connected up in lieu of a battery; but the spirit of Artemus Ward is by no means dead in the United States, and the anecdote may be taken with a grain of salt. Such an experiment was at all events predestined to an ignominious failure. An act of heroism was the turning-point in his career. One day, at the risk of his life, he saved the child of the station-master at Mount Clemens, near Port Huron, from being run over by an approaching train, and the grateful father, Mr. J. A. Mackenzie, learning of his interest in the telegraph, offered to teach him the art of sending and receiving messages. After his daily service was over, Edison returned to Mount Clemens on a luggage train and received his lesson.