An amusing anecdote is imputed to his sister, Mrs. Homer Page, of Milan. Having been told one day that a goose hatches her goslings by the warmth of her body, the child was missed, and subsequently found in the barn curled up in a nest beside a quantity of eggs!

The Lake Shore Railway having injured the trade of Milan, the family removed to Port Huron, in Michigan, when Edison was about seven years old. Here they lived in an old-fashioned white frame-house, surrounded by a grove, and commanding a fine view of the broad river, with the Canadian hills beyond. His mother undertook his education, and with the exception of two months he never went to school. She directed his opening mind to the acquisition of knowledge, and often read aloud to the family in the evening. She and her son were a loving pair, and it is pleasant to know that although she died on April 9, 1871, before he finally emerged from his difficulties, her end was brightened by the first rays of his coming glory.

Mr. Edison tells us that his son never had any boyhood in the ordinary sense, his early playthings being steam-engines and the mechanical powers. But it is like enough that he trapped a wood-chuck now and then, or caught a white-fish with the rest.