He did not have enough money to buy as many papers as he wanted. He asked the superintendent to let him have one thousand copies of the _Press_ on credit. The request was instantly refused. Thereupon he marched up the stairs to the office of the paper’s owner, and asked if he would give him fifteen hundred copies on trust. The owner looked at the boy for a moment, and then wrote out an order. “Take that down-stairs,” said he, “and you will get what you want.” As Edison said in telling the story afterward, “Then I felt happier than I have ever felt since.” He took his fifteen hundred copies to his storehouse on the train. At the station where the first stop was made he usually sold two papers. That day as they ran in to the platform it looked as if a riot had occurred. All the town was clamoring for papers. He sold a couple of hundred at five cents each. Another crowd met him at the next stop, and he raised his price to ten cents a copy. The same thing happened at each place where they stopped. When he reached Port Huron he put what was left of his stock in a wagon, and drove through the main streets. He sold his papers at a quarter of a dollar and more apiece. He went by a church, and called out the news of the battle. In ten seconds the minister and all his congregation were clamoring about the wagon, bidding against each other for copies of the precious issue. He had made a small fortune for a boy, and felt that he owed it largely to his use of the telegraph. Quick-witted he was, beyond a doubt, of an inventive turn, but a shrewd business man on top of all. He wanted to be a telegraph-operator. Electricity fascinated him, and he could watch the machines and listen to the music of their clicking by the hour. He set up a line of his own in his father’s basement at Port Huron, making his batteries of bottles, old stovepipe wire, nails and zinc that he could pick up for a trifle. He studied the subject in his shop in the corner of the baggage-car, during the scant moments when he was neither printer nor newsboy. Once a bottle of phosphorus upset and started a fire. The boy was thrashed and his bottles and wires thrown out. But he was too doggedly persistent to mind any mishap. He saved the small son of the station-master at Port Clements from being run down by a train, and in return the father offered to teach him telegraphy. So little by little he learned his chosen work.