Radio Boys Cronies | Page 7

kindly:
"Well, lots of boys and girls have to work and they often are the better
for it. Edison did--and was."
"Oh, I guess he could have been just as great, or greater if he hadn't
worked," remarked Terry sententiously. "It isn't only poor boys that
amount to----"
"Mostly," said Bill.
"Oh, of course, you'd say that. We'll charge your attitude up to envy."
"When I size up some of the rich men's sons I know, I'm rather glad I'm
poor," said Bill, "and I would rather make a thousand dollars all by my
own efforts than inherit ten thousand."
"I guess you'd take what you could get," Terry offered, and Bill was
quick to reply:

"We know there'll be a lot coming to you and it will be interesting to
know what you'll do with it and how long you'll have it."
"He will never add anything to it," said Ted, who also was the son of
wealth, but not in the least snobbish. The others all laughed at this and
Terry turned away angrily.
Bill, further inspired by what he deemed an unfair reference to Edison,
began to wax eloquent to the others concerning his hero.
"I don't believe Edison would have amounted to half as much as he has
if he hadn't had the hard knocks that a poor fellow always gets. Terry
makes me tired with his high and mighty----"
"Oh, don't you mind him!" said Cora.
"You've read a lot about Edison, haven't you, Bill?" asked Dot,
knowing that the lame boy possessed a hero worshiper's admiration for
the wizard of electricity and an overmastering desire to emulate the
great inventor. The girl sat down on the grassy bank, pulled Cora down
beside her and in her gentle, kindly way, continued to draw Bill out.
"When only quite a little fellow he had become a great reader, the
lecturer said."
"I should say he was a reader!" Bill declared. "Why, when he was
eleven years old he had read Hume's History of England all through
and--"
"Understood about a quarter of it, I reckon," laughed Ted.
"Understood more than you think," Bill retorted. "He did more in that
library than just read an old encyclopedia; he got every book off the
shelves, one after the other, and dipped into them all, but of course,
some didn't interest him. He read a lot on 'most every subject; mostly
about science and chemistry and engineering and mechanics, but a lot
also on law and even moral philosophy and what you call it?
oh--ethics--and all that sort of thing. He had to read to find out things;
there seemed to be no one who could tell him the half that he wanted to

know, and I guess a lot of people got pretty tired of having him ask so
many questions they couldn't answer. And when they would say, 'I
don't know,' he'd get mad and yell: 'Why don't you know?'"
"Hume's history,--why, we have that at home, in ten volumes. If he got
outside of all of that he was going some!" declared Ted.
"Well, he did, and all of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, too."
"Holy cats! What stopped him?" Ted queried.
"He didn't stop--never stopped. But he had to earn his living--didn't he?
He couldn't read all the books and find out about everything right off.
But you bet he found out a lot, and he believes that after a fellow gets
some rudiments of education he can learn more by studying in his own
way and experimenting than by just learning by rote and rule. Maybe
he's not altogether right about that, for education is mighty fine and I'd
like to go to a technical school; Gus and I both are aiming for that, but
we're going to read and study a lot our own way, too, and experiment;
aren't we, Gus? Nobody can throw Edison's ideas down when they stop
to think how much he knows and what he's done."
"He certainly has accomplished a great deal," the usually reticent Gus
offered.
"And yet he seems to be very modest about it," was Cora's contribution.
"Of course, he is; every man who does really big things is never
conceited," declared Bill.
"Oh, I don't know. How about Napoleon?" queried Dot.
"Napoleon? All he ever did was to get up a big army and kill people
and grab a government. He had brains, of course, but he didn't put them
to much real use, except for his own glory. You can't put Napoleon in
the same class with Edison."

"Oh, Billy, you can't say that, can you?"
"I have said it and I'll back it up. Look how Edison has given billions of
people pleasure and comfort and helped trade and commerce. Nobody
could