Telephone Difficulties—Seeing and Believing—Bell and the First Telephone—Choosing Intermediaries by Professions and Appearance—When the Bartender Beat the Preacher and the Farmer—The Prohibition Convention—The Hebrew Drummer as a Satisfactory Proxy. Often I wonder if those who make such glib use of the telephone can possibly realize what it means to be unable to operate it at all. I see my wife with the instrument at her ear bowing and smiling to some invisible talker some miles away. Sometimes I ask why she should smile, frown, or nod, to some one over in the next county, and though she has never given a satisfactory answer, I take it that the mere sound of the human voice is enough to excite most of the emotions. This commonplace affair, as a matter of course conveying audible sound over long distance, becomes to the deaf marvelous, a contrivance almost uncanny. The woman who brought me up was very deaf, and, like many of us who live in the silence, very narrow and most inquisitive. On Winter evenings she would often read aloud to us chapters from Isaiah describing some of the wonders which that poet and visionary predicted for the future. Then she would give her own version of the account, while her husband nodded in his chair and I was busied with my own dreams. I now wonder what would have happened if I had told her that some day a man would stand in the city of Boston with a small instrument at his ear and would hear a person in San Francisco talking in an ordinary tone of voice. At that time there was not even a railroad across the continent. West of Omaha was a wild Indian country, filled with cactus and alkali water. The folly of talking about delivering coherent sound across that waste! I have heard of a missionary who went to the interior of Africa and lived there with a pagan tribe. He told them stories of life in the temperate zone, and while they could not understand, they made no objection and politely listened. Finally he told them that at one season of the year the water froze—that it became so hard that people could walk on it. Here was something tangible; they understood water. The statement that people could walk on it was a lie, of course, and they threatened to kill the liar. Another man, a Vermonter, went to the Island of Java and married a native woman. He told her about buckwheat cakes and maple syrup in the Green Mountain State, and she would not believe him. Finally she came to regard him as a deceiver. He wrote me for help, and I sent him a sack of buckwheat flour and a can of syrup. They made a journey half around the world, but at last the Vermonter cooked a batch of pancakes which quite restored him to favor. The deaf and the deficient are likewise hard to convince unless the evidence is put before them in terms of their own understanding. If I had presented my humble amendment to the prophecies of Isaiah, I think it would have been decided that I possessed an evil spirit of the variety which may be