About this time another telephone system was established in the town--the Farmers'. Now a doctor's clientele includes many farmers, so he put one of the new 'phones into his office. By and by he reflected that farmers are apt to need to consult a physician at night--he must put in a Farmers' 'phone at home, too. And he did. Then he connected it with the office. When the first 'phone went up Mary soon accustomed herself to its call--three rings. When her husband connected it with the office the rings were multiplied by three. One ring meant someone at the office calling central. Two rings meant someone calling the office. Three rings meant someone calling the residence, as before. Mary found the three calls confusing. When the Farmers' 'phone was installed and the same order of rings set up, she found the original ring multiplied by six. This was confusion worse confounded. To be sure the bell on the Farmers' had a somewhat hoarser sound than that on the Citizens' 'phone, but Mary's ear was the only one in the household that could tell the difference with certainty. The clock in the same room struck the half hours which did not tend to simplify matters. When a new door-bell was put on the front door Mary found she had eight different rings to contend with. But it is the bells of the Telephone with which we are concerned and something of their story will unfold as we proceed. When the doctor was at home and the 'phone would ring he would start toward the adjoining room where the two hung and stop at the first. Mary would call "Farmers'!" and he would move on to the next. Perhaps at the same instant the tall boy of the household whose ear was no more accurate than that of his father would shout "Citizens'!" and the doctor would stop between the two. "_Farmers'!_" the wife would call a second time, with accrued emphasis. Then she would laugh heartily and declare: "Any one coming in might think this a sort of forum where orations were being delivered," and sometimes she would go on and declaim: "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears--my husband has borrowed mine." So the telephone in the doctor's house--so great a necessity that we cannot conceive of life without it, so great a blessing that we are hourly grateful for it, is yet a very great tyrant whose dominion is absolute. I had a pleasing picture in my mind in the writing of this chronicle, of sitting serene and undisturbed in a cosy den upstairs, with all the doors between me and the 'phone shut tight where no sound might intrude. In vain. Without climbing to the attic I could not get so far away that the tintinnabulation that so mercilessly wells from those bells, bells, bells did not penetrate. I hope my readers have not got so far away from their Poe as to imagine that ringing sentence to be mine. And I wonder if a still greater glory might not crown his brow if there had been telephone bells to celebrate in Poe's day.