the part of those knights errant of the key whose inevitable fate might
so easily have been his own.

Such a class or group of men can always be presented by an individual
type, and this is assuredly best embodied in Milton F. Adams, one of
Edison's earliest and closest friends, to whom reference will be made in
later chapters, and whose life has been so full of adventurous episodes
that he might well be regarded as the modern Gil Blas. That career is
certainly well worth the telling as "another story," to use the Kipling
phrase. Of him Edison says: "Adams was one of a class of operators never
satisfied to work at any place for any great length of time. He had the
'wanderlust.' After enjoying hospitality in Boston in 1868-69, on the
floor of my hall-bedroom, which was a paradise for the entomologist,
while the boarding-house itself was run on the banting system of flesh
reduction, he came to me one day and said: 'Good-bye, Edison; I have
got sixty cents, and I am going to San Francisco.' And he did go. How, I
never knew personally. I learned afterward that he got a job there, and
then within a week they had a telegraphers' strike. He got a big
torch and sold patent medicine on the streets at night to support the
strikers. Then he went to Peru as partner of a man who had a grizzly
bear which they proposed entering against a bull in the bull-ring in
that city. The grizzly was killed in five minutes, and so the scheme
died. Then Adams crossed the Andes, and started a market-report
bureau in Buenos Ayres. This didn't pay, so he started a restaurant in
Pernambuco, Brazil. There he did very well, but something went wrong
(as it always does to a nomad), so he went to the Transvaal, and ran a
panorama called 'Paradise Lost' in the Kaffir kraals. This didn't pay,
and he became the editor of a newspaper; then went to England to raise
money for a railroad in Cape Colony. Next I heard of him in New York,
having just arrived from Bogota, United States of Colombia, with a power