The open street car is in its mid-career for 1888, and the fiend of the whistler is on the vertex of successful practice. The stranglers of the Orient were an occasional incident in that sunburnt civilization as compared with the death-dealing, pestilential prevalence of the Brooklyn open street-car conductor, literally “armed to the teeth” with his offensive weapon, out of whose depths, impelled by æolic volumes from jerky and gigantic costo-diaphragmatic spasms, issue the ear-splitting and nerve-rending combination of fog-horn and prolonged rifle-crack. From stable to terminus and back, circulating along the outer step, holding on to the uprights with extended arms, facing forever the five-cent and helpless “fares,” two to four inches of potential reed or metal protruding from his embracing lips, like an ill-placed proboscis on a witless pachyderm, he summons the driver to screw up his brake and arrest his sportive team for a fare to unload, or to reverse the process for the temporary torture of more victims in hoisting in of other patrons of the line, and the shrill horror of his whistling signal, right in the faces of the passengers, is made more agonizing by the uncertainty of when and on whom it will discharge its blast, being forever ready for action, like the lance in rest of the jousting knight. It would be easy to aim this calliope at the curbstone or the empyrean, but this regard for the passengers’ tympanum disturbeth not the peaceful slumber of the tramway directory, whose shibboleth is the Vanderbilt curse of “the public be ——.” But sadder than the disregard of common-carriers for public comfort is the unearthed conspiracy of the otologists with the ill-paid conductors on the horse-cars. For some years this specialty throve on the otitis acquired at the bathing-houses at Rockaway and Coney Island, but the public discovered that a little cotton in the meatus was the needful prophylactic, and otitis, as a source of revenue, dwindled to the starvation point. Again, and for a time, the horn of plenty overflows in the otologist’s operating room, and his commissions to the car conductors promise to put them soon on a plane with the diamond-bedecked shirt-fronts of the average hotel clerk. It was said that so possessed was a certain London specialist with the operation of tonsillotomy that these amputated glands were each morning shoveled out of his office by the basketful. There are compensations all through life, and the hordes of cash boys, whose occupation vanished with the introduction of mechanical carriers into the great dry good bazaars, now find ample and continuous employment in sweeping out the heaped up fragments of shattered ear drums from the infirmaries of otological specialists. Verily, this deal among the ear men with the whistling open car conductors for the embezzlement of the community deserves the most summary and high-handed reprobation. There is but the