Perhaps the twelve-year-old boy learned something from the books and papers he sold. At all events he says that the love of chemistry, even at that age, led him to make the corner of the baggage-car where he stored his wares a small laboratory, fitted up with such retorts and bottles as he could pick up in the railroad workshops. He had a copy of Fresenius's "Qualitative Analysis," into which he plunged with the ardor a small boy usually shows for nothing literary unless it has a yellow cover decorated with an Indian's head. He seems also to have had a habit of "hanging around" all interesting places, from a machine-shop to a printing-office, keeping his eyes very wide open. In one such expedition he received as a gift from W.F. Storey, of the _Detroit Free Press_, three hundred pounds of old type thrown out as useless. With an old hand-press he began printing a paper of his own, the _Grand Trunk Herald_, of which he sold several hundred copies a week, the employees of the road being his best customers. "My news," he says, talking of this time, "was purely local. But I was proud of my newspaper and looked upon myself as a full-fledged newspaper man. My items used to run about like this: 'John Robinson, baggage-master at James's Creek Station, fell off the platform yesterday and hurt his leg. The boys are sorry for John.' Or, 'No. 3 Burlington engine has gone into the shed for repairs.'" This was Edison's only dip into a literary occupation. He has no predilection in that way. He realizes the value of newspapers and books, but chiefly as tools, and his splendid library at the Orange laboratory, kept with scrupulous system, is filled with scientific books and periodicals only. Telegraphy was to be the field in which he was to win his first laurels. Some years ago he told the story as follows: