Ted and the Telephone | Page 4

taste than putting things together, especially electrical things; and
already he had tried at home several crude experiments with
improvised telegraphs, telephones, and wireless contrivances.
Doubtless he would have had many more such playthings had not
materials cost so much, money been so scarce, and Ruth and Nancy so
timid. They did not like mysterious sparks and buzzings in the pantry

and about the kitchen and told him so in no uncertain terms.
"The next thing you know you'll be setting the house afire!" Ruth had
asserted. "Besides, we've no room for wires and truck around here.
You'll have to take your clutter somewhere else."
And so Ted had obediently bundled his precious possessions into the
room where he slept with his father only to be as promptly ejected from
that refuge also.
"You can't be spreadin' wires an' jars an' things round my room!"
protested Mr. Turner with annoyance.
[Illustration: "You can't be spreadin' wires an' jars an' things round my
room!" protested Mr. Turner. Page 9.]
It did not seem to occur to him that it was Ted's room as well,--the only
room the boy had.
Altogether, his treasures found no welcome anywhere in the tiny
apartment, and at length convinced of this, Ted took everything down
and stowed it away in a box beneath the bed, henceforth confining his
scientific adventures to the school laboratories where they might
possibly have remained forever but for Mr. Wharton, the manager of
the farms at Aldercliffe and Pine Lea.
CHAPTER II
TED RENEWS OLD TIMES
Mr. Wharton was about the last person on earth one would have
connected with boxes of strings and wires hidden away beneath beds.
He was a graduate of a Massachusetts agricultural college; a keen-eyed,
quick, impatient creature toward whom people in general stood
somewhat in awe. He had the reputation of being a top-notch farmer
and those who knew him declared with zest that there was nothing he
did not know about soils, fertilizers, and crops. There was no nonsense
when Mr. Wharton appeared on the scene. The men who worked for

him soon found that out. You didn't lean on your hoe, light your pipe,
and hazard the guess that there would be rain to-morrow; you just hoed
as hard as you could and did not stop to guess anything.
Now it happened that it was haying time both at Aldercliffe and Pine
Lea and the rumor got abroad that the crop was an unusually heavy one;
that Mr. Wharton was short of help and ready to hire at a good wage
extra men from the adjoining village. Mr. Turner brought the tidings
home from the mill one June night when he returned from work.
"Why don't you try for a job up at Aldercliffe, my lad?" concluded he,
after stating the case. "Ever since you were knee-high to a grasshopper
you had a knack for pitching hay. Besides, you'd make a fine bit of
money and the work would be no heavier than handling freight down at
the mills. You've got to work somewhere through your summer
vacation."
He made the latter statement as a matter of course for a matter of
course it had long since become. Ted always worked when he was not
studying. Vacations, holidays, Saturdays, he was always busy earning
money for if he had not been, there would have been no chance of his
going to school the rest of the time. Sometimes he did errands for one
of the dry-goods stores; sometimes, if there were a vacancy, he helped
in Fernald and Company's shipping rooms; sometimes he worked at the
town market or rode about on the grocer's wagon, delivering orders. By
one means or another he had usually contrived, since he was quite a
small boy, to pick up odd sums that went toward his clothes and
"keep." As he grew older, these sums had increased until now they had
become a recognized part of the family income. For it was understood
that Ted would turn in toward the household expenses all that he earned.
His father had never believed in a boy having money to spend and even
if he had every cent which the Turners could scrape together was
needed at home. Ted knew well how much sugar and butter cost and
therefore without demur he cheerfully placed in the hands of his sister
Ruth, who ran the house, every farthing that was given him.
From childhood this sense of responsibility had always been in his
background. He had known what it was to go hungry that he might

have shoes and go without shoes that he might have underwear. Money
had been very scarce on the Vermont farm, and although there was now
more of it than there ever had been in the past, nevertheless it