References of the telephone abound through these years. The prevailing temper of _Punch_ is shown in one of his earliest allusions to what he calls "The Coming Agony," in 1877. An experiment in long-distance telephoning is described in which a newspaper reporter is quoted as saying, "On putting the instrument to my ear, I felt somewhat as if a regiment of the line had fired a volley, at a hundred yards, into that member." The _Almanack_ of 1878 has a page of telephone pictures, illustrating bottled composers and singers--Gounod, Patti, Nilsson, Santley, Henschel and De Soria--talks with the antipodes, etc. Mary starts a "tallyphone" in the kitchen to converse with her young man; and in another picture, suggested by the phonograph, Du Maurier foreshadows the coming of the gramophone. A more friendly note is struck in the article "Good-bye, Telephone," in 1881, lamenting that vested interests were, by legal decision, ousting the telephone in order to perpetuate the inefficiency of the telegraph:-- We may read about scientific progress, but we must go abroad to see it. The wire that misspells a message, and the street Arab who delivers it at his leisure, are all we shall get in this country till the day when we are conquered by the Irish. On the whole I am inclined to think that this is the strangest of _Punch's_ many strange prophecies. In the illustration of the "Photophone," the long-promised and culminating development of the film, Du Maurier in 1881 depicts the romance of long-distance courtship between Boulogne and Folkestone. The "Telephone Trials" of 1885 are hardly distinguishable from those of to-day. Telephonic communication with Paris was first established in March, 1891, and _Punch_ represents Lord Salisbury and President Carnot conversing over the wire about "outstanding questions." For the ordinary person it was an expensive luxury, even in those days of cheapness, and the lonely wife in Du Maurier's picture, on being reassured by her husband (just off to Paris) that she can talk to him over the telephone, but that it was rather costly, suggests he had better leave her some blank cheques. A cartoon in the following year, 1892, represents the telephone as the Cinderella of the Post Office; but _Punch_ boldly predicts her final triumph over her "ugly sisters"--the Telegraph and the Letter Post. The imperfections of the telephone were simultaneously "guyed" in a delightful burlesque on "Telephonic Theatre-goers," suggested by performances of the "Theatrophone" at the Electrical Exhibition held in that year. The experiences of auditors of different types are ludicrously reproduced, notably those of the Irritable Person who is just beginning to hear the dialogue of an exciting melodrama:-- GHOSTLY VOICES (_in the Irritable Person's ear as before_): "Your _wife_?" "Yes, my wife, and the only woman in the world I ever loved!"