The electric telegraph would convey intelligence more than twenty-eight thousand times round the earth while Puck, at his vaunted speed, was crawling round it only _once_! On every instrument there is a dial, on which is inscribed the names of the six or eight stations with which it usually communicates. When much business is to be transacted, a boy is necessary for each of these instruments; generally, however, one lad can without practical difficulty manage about three; but as the whole of them are ready for work by night as well as by day, they are incessantly attended in watches of eight hours each by these satellite boys by day, and by men at night. As fast as the various messages for delivery, flying one after another from the ground floor up the chimney, reach the level of the instruments, they are brought by the superintendent to the particular one by which they are to be communicated, and its boy, with the quickness characteristic of his age, then instantly sets to work. His first process is, by means of the electric current, to sound a little bell, which simultaneously alarms all the stations on his line; and although the attention of the sentinel at each is thus attracted, yet it almost instantly evaporates from all excepting from that to the name of which he causes the index needle to point, by which signal the clerk at that station instantly knows that the forthcoming message is addressed solely to _him_, and accordingly by a corresponding signal he announces to the London boy that he is ready to receive it. By means of a brass handle affixed to the dial, which the boy grasps in each hand, he now begins rapidly to spell off his information by certain twists of his wrists, each of which imparts to the needles on his dials, as well as to those on the dials of his distant correspondent, a convulsive movement designating the particular letter of the telegraphic alphabet required. By this arrangement he is enabled to transmit an ordinary sized word in three seconds, or about twenty per minute. In case of any accident to the wire of one of his needles, he can, by a different alphabet, transmit his message by a series of movements of the single needle at the reduced rate of about eight or nine words per minute.