Bell had agreed to give him a series of private lessons for $350 a year; and as the child lived with his grandmother in the city of Salem, sixteen miles from Boston, it was agreed that Bell should make his home with the Sanders family.

Here he not only found the keenest interest and sympathy in his air-castles of invention, but also was given permission to use the cellar of the house as his workshop.
For the next three years this cellar was his favorite retreat.

He littered it with tuning-forks, magnets, batteries, coils of wire, tin trumpets, and cigar-boxes.

No one outside of the Sanders family was allowed to enter it, as Bell was nervously afraid of having his ideas stolen.

He would even go to five or six stores to buy his supplies, for fear that his intentions should be discovered.