He is not the type of
scientist who merely stores up knowledge and turns his head into a
museum. Edison is easily the world's greatest scientist. I am not sure
that he is not also the world's worst business man. He knows almost
nothing of business.
John Burroughs was another of those who honoured me with their
friendship. I, too, like birds. I like the outdoors. I like to walk
across country and jump fences. We have five hundred bird houses on the
farm. We call them our bird hotels, and one of them, the Hotel
Pontchartrain--a martin house--has seventy-six apartments. All winter
long we have wire baskets of food hanging about on the trees and then
there is a big basin in which the water is kept from freezing by an
electric heater. Summer and winter, food, drink, and shelter are on hand
for the birds. We have hatched pheasants and quail in incubators and
then turned them over to electric brooders. We have all kinds of bird
houses and nests. The sparrows, who are great abusers of hospitality,
insist that their nests be immovable--that they do not sway in the wind;
the wrens like swaying nests.
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