This birthplace of Edison still remains the plain, substantial brick house it was originally, one-storied, with rooms finished on the attic floor. III EDISON'S EARLY BOYHOOD It was when he was about seven years old that Edison's parents moved to Port Huron, Michigan, and it was there, a few years later, that he began his active life by becoming a newsboy. With his mother he found study easy and pleasant. The quality of the education she gave him may be judged from the fact that before he was twelve years old he had studied the usual rudiments and had read, with his mother's help, Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, Hume's _History of England_, Sear's _History of the World_, Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and the _Dictionary of Sciences_. They even tried to struggle through Newton's _Principia_, but the mathematics were too much for both teacher and student. To this day Edison has little personal use for arithmetic beyond that which is called "mental." He said to a friend, "I can always hire some mathematicians, but they can't hire me." His father always encouraged his literary tastes, and paid him a small sum for each book which he mastered. Although there is no fiction in the list, Edison has all his life enjoyed it, particularly the works of such writers as Victor Hugo. Indeed, later on, when he became a telegraph operator, he was nicknamed by his associates "Victor Hugo Edison"--possibly because of his great admiration for that writer. When he was about eleven years old he became greatly interested in chemistry. He got a copy of Parker's _School Philosophy_, an elementary book on physics, and tried almost every experiment in it. He also experimented on his own account. It is said that he once persuaded a boy employed by the family to swallow a large quantity of Seidlitz powders in the belief that the gases penetrated would enable him to fly. The awful agonies of the victim attracted attention, and Edison's mother marked her displeasure by an application of the switch kept behind the old Seth Thomas "grandfather's clock." It was as early as this that young Alva, or "Al," as he was called, displayed a passion for chemistry, which has never left him. He used the cellar of the house for his experiments and collected there no fewer than two hundred bottles from various places. They contained the chemicals with which he was constant experimenting, and were all marked "Poison," so that no one else would disturb them. He soon became familiar with all the chemicals to be had at the local drug stores, for he did not believe the statements made in his books until he had tested them for himself. Edison used such a large part of his mother's cellar for this, his first laboratory, that, becoming tired of the "mess," she once ordered him to clear out everything. The boy was so much distressed at this that she relented, but insisted that he must keep things under lock and key when he was not there.