Clarence Fernald poked his head in at the door.

"What are you three conspirators up to?" inquired he. "You look as if you were making bombs or some other deadly thing."

"We are making a telephone, Dad, and it won't work," was Laurie's answer.

Mr. Fernald smiled with amus.e.m.e.nt.

"You seem to have plenty of wire," he said. "In fact, if I were permitted to offer a criticism, I should say you had more wire than anything else. How lengthy a circuit do you expect to cover?"

"Oh, we're not ambitious," Laurie replied. "If we can cross the room we shall be satisfied, although now that you mention it, perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad thing if it could run from my room at home over here." He eyed his father furtively. "Then when I happened to have to stay in bed I could talk to Ted and he could cheer me up."

"So he could!" echoed Mr. Fernald in noncommittal fashion.

"It would be rather nice, too, for Mr. Wharton," went on the diplomat with his sidelong glance still fixed on his father. "He must sometimes wish he could reach Ted without bothering to send a man way over here.

And then there are the Turners! Of course a telephone to the shack would give them no end of pleasure. They must miss Ted and often want to speak with him."

He waited but there was no response from Mr. Fernald.

"Ted might be sick, too; or have an accident and wish to get help and----"

At last the speaker was rewarded by having the elder man turn quickly upon him.

"In other words, you young scoundrel, you want me to install a telephone in this shack for the joy and delight of you two electricians who can't seem to do it for yourselves," said Mr. Fernald gruffly.

"Now however do you suppose he guessed it?" exclaimed Laurie delightedly, as he turned with mock gravity to Ted. "Isn't he the mind reader?"

It was evident that Laurie Fernald thoroughly understood his father and that the two were on terms of the greatest affection.

"Did I say I wanted a telephone?" he went on meekly.

"You said everything else," was the grim retort.

"Did I? Well, well!" commented the boy mischievously. "I needn't have taken so much trouble after all, need I? But every one isn't such a Sherlock Holmes as you are, Dad."

Mr. Fernald's scowl vanished and he laughed.

"What a young wheedler you are!" observed he, playfully rumpling up his son's fair hair. "You could coax every cent I have away from me if I did not lock my money up in the bank. I really think, though, that a telephone here in the hut would be an excellent idea. But what I don't see is why you don't do the job yourselves."

"Oh, we could do the work all right if there wasn't danger of our infringing the patent of the telephone company," was Laurie's impish reply. "If we should get into a lawsuit there would be no end of trouble, you know. I guess we'd much better have the thing installed in the regular way."

"I guess so too!" came from his father.

"You'll really have it put in, Dad?" cried Laurie.

"Sure!"

"That will be bully, corking!" Laurie declared. "You're mighty good, Dad."

"Pooh! Nonsense!" his father protested, as he shot a quick glance of tenderness toward the boy. "A telephone over here will be a useful thing for us all. I may want to call Ted up myself sometimes. We never can tell when an emergency may arise."

Within the following week the telephone was in place and although Ted had not minded his seclusion, or thought he had not, he suddenly found that the instrument gave him a very comfortable sense of nearness to his family and to the household at Pine Lea. He and Laurie chattered like magpies over the wire and were far worse, Mrs. Fernald a.s.serted, than any two gossipy boarding-school girls. Moreover, Ted was now able to speak each day with his father at the Fernald shipping rooms and by this means keep in closer touch with his family. As for Mr. Wharton, he marvelled that a telephone to the shack had not been put in at the outset.

"It is not a luxury," he insisted. "It's a necessity! An indispensable part of the farm equipment!"

Certainly in the days to come it proved its worth!

CHAPTER IX

THE STORY OF THE FIRST TELEPHONE

"I am going down to Freeman's Falls this afternoon to get some rubber tape," Ted remarked to Laurie, as the two boys and the tutor were eating a picnic lunch in Ted's cabin one Sat.u.r.day.

"Oh, make somebody else do your errand and stay here," Laurie begged.

"Anybody can buy that stuff. Some of the men must be going to the Falls. Ask Wharton to make them do your shopping."

"Perhaps Ted had other things to attend to," ventured Mr. Hazen.

"No, I hadn't," was the prompt reply.

"In that case I am sure any of the men would be glad to get whatever you please," the tutor declared.

"Save your energy, old man," put in Laurie. "Electrical supplies are easy enough to buy when you know what you want."

"They are now," Mr. Hazen remarked, with a quiet smile, "but they have not always been. In fact, it was not so very long ago that it was almost impossible to purchase either books on electricity or electrical stuff of any sort. People's knowledge of such matters was so scanty that little was written about them; and as for shops of this type--why, they were practically unknown."

"Where did persons get what they wanted?" asked Ted with surprise.

"n.o.body wanted electrical materials," laughed Mr. Hazen. "There was no call for them. Even had the shops supplied them, n.o.body would have known what to do with them."

"But there must have been some who would," the boy persisted. "Where, for example, did Mr. Bell get his things?"

"Practically all Mr. Bell's work was done at a little shop on Court Street, Boston," answered Mr. Hazen. "This shop, however, was nothing like the electrical supply shops we have now. Had Alexander Graham Bell entered its doors and asked, for instance, for a telephone transmitter, he would have found no such thing in stock. On the contrary, the shop consisted of a number of benches where men or boys experimented or made crude electrical contrivances that had previously been ordered by customers. The shop was owned by Charles Williams, a clever mechanical man, who was deeply interested in electrical problems of all sorts. In a tiny showcase in the front part of the store were displayed what few textbooks on electricity he had been able to gather together and these he allowed the men in his employ to read at lunch time and to use freely in connection with their work. He was a person greatly beloved by those a.s.sociated with him and he had the rare wisdom to leave every man he employed unhampered, thereby making individual initiative the law of his business."

The tutor paused, then noticing that both the boys were listening intently, he continued:

"If a man had an idea that had been carefully thought out, he was given free rein to execute it. Tom Watson, one of the boys at the shop, constructed a miniature electric engine, and although the feat took both time and material, there was no quarrel because of that. The place was literally a workshop, and so long as there were no drones in it and the men toiled intelligently, Mr. Williams had no fault to find. You can imagine what valuable training such a practical environment furnished. n.o.body nagged at the men, n.o.body drove them on. Each of the thirty or forty employees pegged away at his particular task, either doing work for a specific customer or trying to perfect some notion of his own. If you were a person of ideas, it was an ideal conservatory in which to foster them."

"Gee! I'd have liked the chance to work in a place like that!" Ted sighed.

"It would not have been a bad starter, I a.s.sure you," agreed Mr. Hazen.

"At that time there were, as I told you, few such shops in the country; and this one, simple and crude as it was, was one of the largest. There was another in Chicago which was bigger and perhaps more perfectly organized; but Williams's shop was about as good as any and certainly gave its men an excellent all-round education in electrical matters.

Many of them went out later and became leaders in the rapidly growing world of science and these few historic little shops thus became the ancestors of our vast electrical plants."

"It seems funny to think it all started from such small beginnings, doesn't it," mused Laurie thoughtfully.