"Questions, questions, questions! Why must the boy always ask questions!" Dr. Morse was not often impatient, but after an hour with his oldest boy he sometimes exploded. No more inquisitive boy had ever lived in Charlestown, Massachusetts!

Young Samuel Finley Breese Morse was sorry he thought of so many questions. If he didn't ask, though, how could he find out what he wanted to know? Why did birds go south for the the winter? Why did sparks fly when he rubbed the cat's fur? Why could a magnet pick up nails? How did the fire engine work? And why did people tell him curiosity killed the cat?

Samuel tried to remember not to ask questions. It was easy to forget, however, when he came upon something new and interesting. The new thing was always so fascinating and important! Dr. Morse once warned his son that his slow, steady brother was like the Tortoise in Aesop's fable, while Samuel was like the Hare. "You move swiftly," he explained. But you stop by the wayside so much—not to sleep, you understand, but to examine everything you see."

The Tortoise had won a race, Samuel remembered. "But if I didn't stop by the wayside, like the Hare," he argued to himself, "I'd miss so much!"

What if he had missed the wonderful experiment with magnets he had seen when he stopped to ask an artist where to buy colors and brushes? If he hadn't stopped on his way to school one day, to watch a curious cat, he might not have learned that he could draw excellent likenesses. If he and his friend Billy hadn't stopped to play on the Bowen farm, he might never have discovered a way to send messages for miles by signals. He'd miss all the interesting things!

Despite good intentions, Samuel just could not be a quiet, steady, hard-working boy like his brother Sidney. The only thing that always held his attention was drawing. He loved to draw and paint, and his parents feared that Samuel was going to be a limner—a shiftless painter of likenesses.

He did grow up to be a portrait painter—one of the best in America in the early nineteenth century—but more than that, the famous inventor of the electric telegraph and the code by which messages could be sent instantly over long distances. This entertaining story by Dorothea J. Snow, who has written three other books for this series, introduces the lively, likable boy who was to become an artist-inventor and shows how the traits of his boyhood may have led Morse at last to his invention and world-wide fame.

From the dust jacket