"While young Edison was wading through such mammoth works as Sears's
_History of the World_, Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and the
_Dictionary of Sciences_ (and had begun to wrestle desperately with
Newton's _Principia_!) he was showing a rare passion for chemistry. He
'annexed' the cellar for a laboratory. His mother said she counted, at
one time, no less than two hundred bottles of chemicals, all shrewdly
marked POISON, so that no one but himself would dare to touch them.
Before long the lad took up so much room in his mother's cellar with his
'mess,' as she called it, that she told him to take it out, 'bag and
baggage.'

"He once stated that his great desire to make money was largely because
he needed the cash to buy materials for experiments. Therefore, in this
emergency, he took keen pleasure in buying all the chemicals, appliances
and apparatus he wished, and installing them in his real 'bag and
baggage' car. As the railroad authorities had allowed him to set up a
printing press, in addition to his miscellaneous stock in trade, why
should he not have his laboratory there also? So his stock of batteries,
chemicals and other 'calamity' grew apace.

"One day, after several weeks of happiness in his moving laboratory, he
was 'dead to the world' in an experiment. Suddenly the car gave a lurch
and jolted the bottle of phosphorus off its shelf. It broke, flamed up,
set fire to the floor and endangered the whole train. While the boy was
frantically fighting the fire, the Scotch conductor, red-headed and
wrathy, rushed in and helped him to put it out.

"By this time they were stopping at Mt. Clemens, where the indignant
Scotchman boxed the boy's ears and put him out also. Then the man threw
the lad's bottles, apparatus and batteries after him, as if they were