and then murmur, more forcibly than elegantly, "All right, my boy: keep pluggin' away."

Like most geniuses, he had (and I suppose has) his gales and his grouches. Sometimes nothing would suit him, for days together: and then he was all brightness and gayety. I seldom saw a man whom the word "impossible" made angrier. "It never ought to have been put into the dictionary", he used to say. A very efficient German engineer, upon whom he had set great store, came out before us all, one day, and said, "Mr. Edison, there is no use of going any farther with this experiment-it is sheer foolishness: and never can be a success."

It happened to be one of the chief's "bad days": and nothing could have gone farther to make it worse. "Mr.

", he thundered, "when Saturday night comes, you will draw your blue envelope, and never come into this place. again: this is no home for impossibilities."

"By gracious", said one of the men. to me, confidentially, "if the Boss should tell me to draw plans for a machine to lift a war-ship out of the ocean, as they say Archimedes did, or induce the sun to stand still, like Joshua, I'd go at it, and work till he told me to stop."

Probably this wonderful power of scorning failure and living laborious nights and days, has gone far toward making Edison a world-success. I have known him to make forty thousand experiments to accomplish one object, and not secure one bit of encouragement, until the last ten thousand began-and not much then: but to grandly and thoroughly triumph at last.

His usual hours of work, are from eight to twelve, and one to five: but when there is something peculiarly vital on the tapis, chronological system is flung aside, and Father Time is ignored. In such cases, seventeen hours out of the twentyfour is not considered by him an unreasonable number, and his enthusiasm is such as to carry all his employees with him that he chooses to take along, in his dash around and around the dial.

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Mr. Edison has a wife-an attractive one, with aristocratic ideas, and democratic manners. His only daughter has the aristocratic ideas and manners both. His older son-climbing along up among the twenties-will probably never invent anything of value. His younger son, still in his teens, has built an automobile that could not be moved out of the barn in which it was made, wthout taking down the doors. There was something, too, about the speedlimit, which the village authorities, Mr. Edison, and Mr. Edison, Jr., had to adjust. But he has one merit: he is ambitious to do something in the world, besides being the son of.

When his wife is on the way to make one of her occasional visits to the office in which he toils, he immediately begins to "sleek things up." All the smokingparaphernalia is shoved out of sight, and certain traces of the tobacco which he habitually chews, are wiped away. The office is made, as far as possible, a guest-room-fit for princess or queen. The quickness and ingenuity with which he can transform things, is always a delight and an amusement to his employees.

With unwelcome visitors, however, he adopts exactly the opposite course. It is wonderful how his deafness can come down on him when he wants it to do so. It is also remarkable what awful odors he can make the chemicals in his laboratory produce, when he wishes it uninhabitable. Once, when a company of clergymen came into the laboratory to ask him about the state of his soul or something, he went into a trance (or toward, one) and by some legerdemain smashed a volt-meter valued at a thousand dollars, and laughed heartily after they had fled in fright. Sometimes he will say the most nonsensical things to a persistent interviewer-like that he declared not many days since, that "man has no individuality." He is also variable in his habits: sometimes being at strict vegetarian for a number of weeks, and then "falling from grace", and perpetrating the most carnivorous of actions.

In other words, he is a genius-with all a genius' proper improprieties, and concentric eccentricities.

Many think, and I believe he does, that his most wonderful and original invention is the phonograph-and he is piqued because the devising of that was really an accident-occurring while he was endeavoring, by means of hard and strenuous study, to invent something else. He declares he will not waste any time improving the aeroplane-not believing that it will ever be practicable on a large scale: an opinion, by the way, shared with Wilbur Wright, according to his own statement.

He spent five years on the perpetualmotion problem-and gave it up, in something very nearly akin to disgust. "I'll let somebody else do that," he exclaimed, "and they'll never do it."

He is trying to connect the phonograph with the motion picture, and has succeeded, to some extent: but it is not

yet well-enough developed to put it on the market. When it is, he expects that the performance of the huge kinetoscope of today will no longer be known as "The silent drama", but that the exhibits will be regular artificial theatrical programs.

He is an industrious collector and a careful saver of the voices of famous men and women, and has large stores of them. I asked him one day what one he had rather have of all in the world, and he answered, with that often-noticed desire of human nature for what it knows it cannot get,

"I would give more for one word from Napoleon the Great, than for all the rest of my records put together."

He will be greatly honored in Europe, as he richly deserves: and none will glory more in reading of the process, than those who have toiled under his patient, vigilant, and sagacious direction. and tutelage.

There are invisible blood-stains on every national flag.

The dining-table has killed more men than the battle-field.

Success is ninetynine hundredths a matter of endurance.

Tears are never unmanly, unless the one that sheds them is.

A thought is good for nothing, unless it breeds more thoughts.

The bashfulest boys often become the most self-possessed men.

Several people who do not believe

key, seem doing their best to prove that the monkey may be an evolution from

HENRY WARD BEECHER wanted

to be a sailor, once. It was lucky for him that he never tried it: for he would have died of sea-sickness. He made his first voyage across the ocean in the old sailing packet, "John Bright", in 1850. All the way over and all the way back, he lay in his berth deadly sick. He was the author of that famous assertion: "At first I was afraid I would die, and then I was afraid I wouldn't!"

Those days, in the old sailing-ships, the sailors were constantly singing about their work. Young Beecher heard the songs, and associated them with the agonies of sea-sickness. Years afterwards, the old "John Bright" came sailing up the harbor, one beautiful Sunday morning in June, as Mr. Beecher was shaving himself at an open window; and as he saw the old ship, and heard once more the familiar songs, he was attacked with nausea, and other unpleasant symptoms of seasickness.

The writer well remembers how, as a small boy, he was put under the care of a somewhat dismal, but very pious and conscientious woman, well advanced in years. She felt it her duty to impress upon his mind at a tender age the idea that he was a most desperate sinner, both by nature and practice; and in this the old woman was not far from the truth. She had terrible headaches, and by way of remedy used to apply bandages of boiled vinegar to her head. To this day the writer cannot smell boiled vinegar without feeling that he is an awful sinner.

Not long since he was in a home where tomato-pickles were being concocted, and the house was redolent with boiled vinegar. He felt as if the accumulated guilt of Adam and all his descendants were pressing down upon him.

A retired army officer who had joined the church and had a reputation for unusual sanctity, was called upon at the beginning of the Civil War, to drill some raw-recruits. As soon as he began his drilling, he swore most terrible oaths. This was very dreadful to his pious neighbors; who remonstrated with him for setting such a bad example to the young men he was drilling. To their astonishment, they found that he was entirely unconscious of the fact. It was the power of the association of ideas. He had been in the habit of accompanying his instructions with profane expressions in his old army days, and they flowed unconsciously from his lips as soon as he began to drill an awkward squad.

Sometimes certain muscular movements become associated with certain words. A military officer who was something of a wag, saw a soldier in his company carrying in his hands a tray containing the dinner designed for another officer. He suddenly and in at loud tone called out the word "Attention"! Down went the soldier's arms to his side, and down went the dinner on the side-walk. This was the power of the association of ideas. That word "attention" acted on the soldier as if he were a puppet pulled by a string.

It is an undoubted fact that we human beings are very curiously contrived

machines. We are very largely automatons: puppets pulled by strings. One day an old farmer's horse came home without him, and he was found lying by the side of the road with his skull fractured by being thrown out and hitting a telegraph pole.

His horse had been frightened by an automobile. As soon as the trepanning instrument was placed on his head and the fractured bit of the skull lifted from pressing on the brain, his lips parted and the words "Whoa Dolly!" came from his lips as if shot out of a pistol.

His last conscious volition had been to caution Dolly not to be too rash: but before he could turn the volition into words his head hit the telegraph pole, and put his talking-gear out of commission. It was loaded in, however, and came forth when the clog was taken out of the machinery.

Our sensations, ideas, and emotions are associated in groups. A certain hymn is sung in church, and the woman. next you weeps violently. She explains afterwards that that hymn was sung at her mother's funeral. The vibrations caused by the music bring up the whole. associated group of ideas, sensations, emotions, and tender sentiments that were hers at the time of her mother's funeral.

This plays a very large part in emotional religion. A boy saying his prayers at his mother's knee has an associ

ated group of ideas-tender, elevating, and pure-in his mind. If that little boy grown up to manhood, can have vividly brought before him a picture of himself as a tiny figure in white kneeling at his mother's knee, instantly the group of sensations returns, and he is once more, for the time being, that gentle, loving, tender, little boy. Then remind him of some man who has injured him and whom he hates! and he is transformed in an instant into another group of sensations, and curses his enemy and swears vengeance.

So we

pass from one associated group of sensations to another in our minds, as we pass from room to room in our houses.

From this fact, one that understands

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human nature can play upon us as if we were pipe-organs. That is the secret of the wonderful power of words. This is the art of the skillful revival preacher.

"All the men in this room who have had praying mothers, please raise their hands!" he cries. This lets loose a mighty power in the congregation. It produces an atmosphere of contrition, tenderness, love, and gentleness. In every man there is some such imageor, God help him!

Two sailors, hard, reckless, and abandoned, were playing cards in a gambling hell. They were playing for money, with rum and revolvers on the table. One of them, as he fumbled the cards, not thinking what he sang, began to hum:

"One sweetly solemn thought Comes to me o'er and o'er." "What's that yer singin'?" growled his companion.

"Singin'?-dunno! What was it?" "Why, you was a singin' a hymn, mate! One they used ter sing in Sunday School when I was a kid!"

It was not long before they both recalled the hymn. They left the gambling hell, and went down to a lonely place by the river; and there each said he was sick of his bad life. The hymn brought back the group of associations. that had belonged to their innocent childhood, and in them there was power. to change their lives.

What is called conversion, is a change from an evil group of associated ideas, to a good one.

Sometimes whole trains of thought are associated together by the most trivial incidents. The writer when a student in Germany used to attend the lectures of Prof. Kuno Fischer, of Heidelberg. He used no manuscript, but spoke with great fluency and ease. He always held a small key in his hand. One day he dropped this key and could not go on with his lecture till it was restored to him. It was evidently the key to the situation.

The New York Times of Friday, July