To the Land of Evangeline, his Netherlands forebears are said to have treked with the United Empire Loyalists in Revolutionary times. A generation later they left Nova Scotia and settled in that part of the Province of Ontario now registered as the County of Norfolk. Near the little town of Vienna, close to Lake Erie’s shore, where I believe relatives still reside, Thomas Edison’s elder brothers were born, but not until after 1837, when Robert Edison transferred his family to Milan, Ohio, twelve miles from Lake Erie, did the lad Thomas and his sister first behold the sunshine, the birth of the former occurring February, 1847. Evidently his elementary education began in that state, but the fact that his brother Pitt Edison, managed a street railway at Port Huron, Michigan, probably accounts for the lad’s presence thereabouts and furnished an incentive to his precocious, nomadic predilections. Joseph Draper from the County of Tipperary, ninety-year-old veteran, living in Toronto, recently deceased, who was in 1855 a giant conductor with the Ontario, Simcoe & Huron Railroad, (Northern Railway), told me he remembered well how young Thomas Edison later on sold newspapers between Detroit and Port Huron, on his trains running through to Sarnia and London. He declared that the embryo merchant was an active, well behaved and likeable stripling who, even during the chrysalis stage, nourished a specific bent by carrying with him a portable telegraph key. During the weary months of the Civil War, 1862–3, he obtained in Detroit a printing press, old type, with accessories and learning the contents of war bulletins, etc., from station to station, set up and printed the news and jokes which he sold along the line under the caption “Grand Trunk Herald.” Conductor Draper said he was often compelled to reprimand the boy for tinkering with chemicals and for his untidiness with bottles in that corner of the baggage car where he kept his stock of magazines and candy. He intimated also that about this time the young experimentor risked his life in saving the child of the Grand Trunk Railway Agent at Mount Clemens, Michigan, from an onrushing train and the grateful father taught him telegraphing. Living in an atmosphere of daily contact with keys and sounders, he took to “jerking lightning” like a sailor to the sea, soon becoming proficient. “This is the song of the wire-- The electric wire: The slender thread with a soul of fire, With the wings of light that shall never tire, With a power and grandeur awful and dire; The electric wire.”