pears to such advantage as when she is doing every thing in her power to plague me. retentive. [Exit. 1 TĂM BÔUR. A frame on which cloth | 5 TE-NA'CIOUS (-shus). Holding fast; is stretched for convenience of embroidering. 6 HÜR'DLE. A sort of sledge on which XCV. THE MAGIC WIRE. BRYANT. 1. I SPEAK in behalf of the wires. Charles Lamb, in one of his papers, remarks that a piece of news, which, when it left Botany Bay, was true to the let ter, often becomes a lie before it reaches England. It is the advantage of the telegraph that it gives you the news before circumstances have had time to alter. The press is enabled to lay it fresh before the reader. It comes to him like a steak hot and fresh from the gridiron, instead of being cooled and rendered flavorless by a slow journey from a distant kitchen. 2. A battle is fought three thousand miles away, and we have the particulars while they are taking the wounded to the hospital. A great orator rises in the British Parliament, and we read his words almost before the cheers of his friends have ceased. An earthquake shakes San Francisco, and we have the news before the people who have rushed into the street have returned to their houses. I am afraid that the columns of the daily newspapers would now seem flat, dull, and stale to the reader were it not for the communications of the telegraph. 3. But while the telegraph does this for the press, the press in some sort returns the obligation. Were it not for the press, the telegram, being repeated from mouth to mouth, would, from the moment of its arrival, begin to lose something of its authenticity.2 Every rumor propagated 3 orally, at last becomes false. You are familiar with the personification of Rumor by the poets of antiquity—at first of dwarfish size, and rapidly enlarging in bulk till her feet sweep the earth, and her head is among the clouds. The press puts Rumor into a strait-jacket, binds her from head to foot, and so restrains her growth. It transcribes the messages of the telegraph in their very words, and thus prevents them from being magnified and mutilated into lies. It protects the repu tation of the telegraph for veracity. You know what a printer's devil is. It is the messenger who brings to the printer his copy that is to say, matter which is to be put into type. Some petulant, impatient author, I suppose, who was negligent in furnishing the required copy, must have given him that name; although he is so useful that he is better entitled to be called the printer's angel, the original word for angel and messenger being the same. 4. In the Treatise on Bathos, Pope quotes, as a sample of absurdity not to be surpassed, a passage from some play, I think one of Nat Lee's, pressing the modest wish of a lover, "Ye gods, annihilate both space and time, And make two lovers happy." ex But see what changes a century brings forth. What was then an absurdity, what was arrant nonsense, is now the statement of a naked fact. The wires have annihilated both space and time in the transmission of intelligence. The breadth of the Atlantic, with all its waves, is as nothing; and in sending a message from Europe to this continent, the time, as computed by the clock, is some six hours less than nothing. 5. My imagination goes down to the chambers of the middle sea, to those vast depths where reposes the mystic wire on beds of coral, among forests of tangle, or on the bottom of the dim blue gulfs strewn with the bones of whales and sharks, skeletons of drowned men, and ribs and masts of foundered barks, laden with wedges of gold never to be coined, and pipes of the choicest vintages of earth never to be tasted. Through these watery solitudes, among the fountains of the great deep, the abode of perpetual silence, never visited by living human presence, and beyond the sight of human eye, there are gliding to and fro, by night and by day, in light and in darkness, in calm and in tempest, currents of human thought, borne by the electric pulse which obeys the bidding of man. That slender wire thrills with the hopes and fears of nations; it vibrates to every emotion that can be awakened by any event affecting the wel fare of the human race. 6. A volume of contemporary history passes every hour of the day from one continent to the other. An operator on the continent of Europe gently touches the keys of an instrument in his quiet room, a message is shot with the swiftness of light through the abysses of the sea, and before his hands are lifted from the machine, the story of re volts and revolutions, of monarchs dethroned and new dynasties set up in their place, of battles and conquests and treaties of peace, of great statesmen fallen in death, lights of the world gone out, and new luminaries glimmering on the horizon, is written down in another quiet room on the other side of the globe. 7. I see in the circumstances which I have enu. merated a new proof of the superiority of mind to matter, of the independent existence of that part of our nature which we call the spirit, when it can thus subdue, enslave, and educate the subtilest, the most active, and in certain of its manifestations the most intractable and terrible of the elements, making it in our hands the vehicle of thought, and compelling it to speak every language of the civilized world. I infer the capacity of the spirit for a separate state of being, its indestructible essence and its noble destiny, and I thank the great discoverer whom we honor for this confirmation of my faith. 1 STALE. Old; not fresh; long kept. ness. 3 PROP'A-GAT-ED. Spread abroad by carrying from place to place. XCVI. THE FACE AGAINST THE PANE. T. B. ALDRICH. [Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1836. He is a popular writer both in prose and verse. He is at present (1871) a resident of Boston, and editor of the weekly journal called "Every Saturday." 1. MABEL, little Mabel, With her face against the pane, She hears the sea bird screech, To and fro, to and fro, Till it seems like some old crone Standing out there all alone with her woe, Wringing as she stands Her gaunt and palsied hands; While Mabel, timid Mabel, 2. Set the table, maiden Mabel, Is out there in the storm; |