When he was eleven years old, his father died and the reins of management fell into Edgar's hands. That young man, being in no sense a typical farmer, immediately exchanged the farm, which the elder St. Ives had bequeathed him, for a large country store. By dint of shrewd management, he soon became a successful merchant. So rapidly did he rise that by the end of the second year, he had built himself a house and installed in it a shrewish wife who lost no time in presenting him with a swarm of children. He also placed in the house his mother, and the poor lady dwelt there under the lash of the wife's tongue, like a servant in constant fear of dismissal. In righteous mood, Edgar even went so far as to extend the protection of his roof to his young brother. In a tiny chamber over the kitchen the lad's first tentative inventions saw the light.
But between these two natures a gulf was fixed. If truth were told, they had not a trait in common. Edgar was provident and saving, Emil the reverse. Long ere he had obtained his majority, he had wheedled from his mother the little money she held in trust for him from his grudging and disapproving father. To be sure, the sum was very meagre and could not be stretched, by any calculation, to cover the technical training the lad coveted; therefore he had expended a part of it for scientific books and the rest had gone little by little into materials for his constant experimenting.
For the precious little inventions which cluttered Emil's chamber and sometimes found their unwelcome way into other parts of the house, Edgar had a withering contempt. He never missed an opportunity to have a fling at them and his scornful words entered the mother's heart like barbed arrows. However, in his nineteenth year Emil produced an apparatus for freshening sea water which it seemed must prove of inestimable value to all sea-faring folk. The mother in a flutter of excitement and even with tears, besought him to take his brother into his confidence. In fact this was necessary, if he wished to secure the use of an abandoned and much coveted granary for a shop. But the lad held back. The apparatus, despite its undoubted usefulness, seemed to him of trifling importance. The mother, however, foreseeing fortune ahead of him, urged the step and at length the boy consented. True to her prediction, after his first scornful inspection of the contrivance, Edgar admitted that it might have possibilities. Like most of the boy's experiments, this device was beyond his comprehension, but he could grasp the fact that sailors and fishermen, with the chance of shipwreck forever staring them in the face, might have use for it. He therefore offered to get it patented, then took steps to secure the patent--in his own name. As it chanced, the papers, bearing his signature but otherwise carefully copied from those which Emil had submitted for his inspection fell under the boy's eye.