large sheets of cardboard. The clerk was about to roll the sheets for easy handling, but his customer protested: “I wish to carry them as they are.” The curiosity of this man also was aroused. He remembered that the lad was said to be “always trying to invent something.” As he handed them over he asked: “What are you going to do with them?” Eagerly the boy answered: “We are forbidden to light our windows with candles. I’m going to shoot my candles through the air.” “Tut! Tut!” exclaimed the man, laughingly. “That’s an impossibility.” “No, sir,” the boy responded, with a flash of enthusiasm. “There is nothing impossible.” This is a true story, told by an old-time Lancaster historian. The thirteen-year-old boy was Robert Fulton, who became the inventor of steam navigation. It is good to carry the story further in imagination. That group of boys who gathered in the town during the twilight of Independence Day, 1778, saw a few spluttering rockets shoot skyward from the hand of a lad determined to carry the good news of freedom to a higher horizon than that of the home windows of Lancaster. A flash! A whirr! and the light arose, zigzagged its message through the darkness, like fiery handwriting in the sky, and th
