MacDowell was shy and modest and was quite surprised when different colleges made him a Doctor of Music, when great concert players meekly asked him if they played his sonatas as he wished them played, and when medals and jewels were sent him as gifts.
A good many studios are now built near MacDowell's log cabin in Peterboro, and musicians and authors stay in the forest through the summer months, liking the quiet spot and hoping the sight of his log cabin may make them work as faithfully for the glory of America as Edward MacDowell did.
Even the French artist who wished to make a portrait painter of him must have been glad that MacDowell clung to music, and Mrs. MacDowell found that her Jack-of-all-trades was really master of one.
THOMAS ALVA EDISON
If ever there was a busy boy, Thomas Edison, who was born in Milan, Ohio, was one. He wanted to do everything that he saw others doing, and more than that, he liked to contrive new ways of doing things. The grown-up people wished he would not ask so many questions or stay always at their elbows, watching their work. But it came out all right in the end, these busy ways of his, for to-day he is one of the world's greatest inventors.
Thomas was a sunny, laughing, little boy, and pretty, too, except when he was trying to think how something was made; then he would scowl and pucker up his mouth until you would hardly know him. He always wanted to know how machinery worked and asked his father, or any one near by, to explain it to him. Sometimes his father would get all tired out answering questions, and to get rid of the little chap would say: "I don't know." Then Thomas would stare at his father and say: "You don't know! Why don't you know?" Then, if Mr. Edison did not answer, Thomas would perhaps run down by the water, along the tow-path for the canal.
There were shipyards by the water, and he would pick up the different tools and ask the workmen what the name of each was, how it was used and why it was used, and get in their way generally until they drove him home. He built fine houses and tiny villages, with plank sidewalks, from the bits of wood these ship-builders gave him. The belts and wheels in the saw and grist mills pleased him. He watched them often. Once, in one of the mills, he fell into a pile of wheat in a grain elevator and had nearly smothered before he was found. Several times he fell into the canal and came near drowning.
When Thomas was six years old, he watched a goose sitting on her eggs and saw them hatch. He wanted to understand this strange thing better, so he gathered all the goose and hen's eggs he could and made a big nest in his father's barn. Then all of a sudden, he was missing. The family rushed to the canal, the village, and the mills, and finally found him sitting on the nest of eggs in the barn. He wanted to see if he could hatch those eggs out!