The
editor avenged his insulted dignity by excluding the subscriber's name
from the pages of the PAUL PRY.
Youthful genius is apt to prove unlucky, and another story (we hope they
are all true, though we cannot vouch for them), is told of his
partiality for riding with the engine-driver on the locomotive. After he
had gained an insight into the working of the locomotive he would run
the train himself; but on one occasion he pumped so much water into the
boiler that it was shot from the funnel, and deluged the engine with
soot. By using his eyes and haunting the machine shops he was able to
construct a model of a locomotive.
But his employment of the telegraph seems to have diverted his thoughts
in that direction, and with the help of a book on the telegraph he
erected a makeshift line between his new laboratory and the house of
James Ward, one of his boy helpers. The conductor was run on trees, and
insulated with bottles, and the apparatus was home-made, but it seems to
have been of some use. Mr. James D. Reid, author of THE TELEGRAPH IN
AMERICA, would have us believe that an attempt was made to utilise the
electricity obtained by rubbing a cat connected up in lieu of a battery;
but the spirit of Artemus Ward is by no means dead in the United States,
and the anecdote may be taken with a grain of salt.
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