undeniably musical characters known as the spaced letters. The result was a largely predominating number of nays. But this did not settle it. Rumors were at once rife that General Eckert had signified his intention of agitating the adoption of the English alphabet, and everybody began trying his hand with it. On the Pittsburg wire Mr. Tierney proceeded to use it quite successfully. The day man on the Cincinnati duplex was puzzled by being answered “i i—J” instead of “C,” and everywhere the changed letters seemed to have got the mastery of the operators.

The genial Gilbert Q. Olmstead, whose melodious “answer on number hi ji” so often cleaves the night air from the region of No.17 South, was melancholy at the thought that the merry jingle of “ox” would be heard no more, under the new dispensation. “Alas,” he quoth in effect, “that I should bid farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness, and be known in the future by the unlettered appellation of ‘59’ ” A youth to whom this office is comparatively “fresh fields and pastures new,” was sent to relieve “ox” for supper. After a while he concluded that “patience had ceased to be a virtue,” and reported that he couldn’t start that press on No.17; he had called Philadelphia twenty minutes and all he could get out of him was, “i, i,—Wait.” Here was Continental with a vengeance, for “i i—1” is really “i i—P.” Another youngster whose toilet is one of the wonders of the nineteenth century, was found weeping at an unused desk, and when questioned, replied that he couldn’t stay in the business, if, under any new order of things, a pretty girl was to be mentioned as a “1 fetty gifx.”

Whether the Continental shall be adopted or not, remains to be seen, but in any case it will only require a few weeks’ practice to master it, and whatever other vexations may come out of the change, there is this consolation: It will be decidedly inconvenient for the Shelleys, the Reynoldes, the De Graws, the Boileaus, the Ayreses, the Mareans, the Stanfords, the Kettleses, and Merrills to “sush” us, and that is a point not to be ignored by men of family ties and claims, to whom telegraphing long since lost its romance, and to whom the business now seems very much “like a tale that is told.”

“Its no use talking,” observed conductor Longworthy one night, as we drove away from City Hall. “I can stand having my rights trampled on by a nigger, I can put up with the blooming Celestial, the flannel mouth, and your Italian lazarony, but when it comes to being called a pock-marked son of a sea cook, an attenuated scion of podsnappery, and a plum with a mug on him like a skunk skin drawn over a gunlock, when it comes to this at twenty cents a trip, I feel like being stuffed with straw, painted yellow, and set up in the Hippodrome as a female Colossus.” Having delivered himself of this sentiment, he remained silent for a few minutes and I smoked my cigar placidly. Presently, after gazing at the moon and stars he said, in reply to some remark of mine about the Beecher trial: “Speaking of this Beecher scandal, I hope the old man will come out all right, I do indeed. There is that about Henry Ward which commands my admiration. He reminds me, sir, of what Oliver Goldsmith says in the ‘Deserted Village’ about his father:

The car stopped. Two or three men were shouting and gesticulating on the curb stone, but gave no sign of approaching until Longworthy called out: “If yer coming, come long, der yer want me to bring the car over to yer?”

One of the New York day chiefs had been moving his household goods and gods, and during his absence Mr. Sam Bogart, then an operator, had officiated at the switch with all his pristine grace. He had been the veriest artist with crosses, grounds, and escapes, and had chatted about ohms, megohms, resistance, and induction, with all the familiarity that your true New York waiter exhibits with the subject of ancient eggs, when he startles you by translating your order for three hard boiled, into “chicken buds three times.” But you know what Iago or Othello or Desdemona or some other of those misguided people who figure in the “Moor of Venice” says: