Besides, the guilty parties are quickly found out. Just as the fingers of a blind man acquire surprising sensitiveness, so the operators' ears distinguish the timbre, the tone, the musical value of the chatters whom they have never seen. For the initiated the electric radiations have a personality like human speech. Two posts, two ships have distinct voices, pronunciations. This one talks with a sputter, the other speaks with solemn slowness; the voice of one suggests a match scratched on sandpaper, another buzzes like a fly, another sings small, like the flight of mosquitoes. It is a concert almost magical. In his padded cabin the operator hears and distinguishes the whirr of the cricket, the squeak of the violin, the rasped wing-cover of the beetle, the hiss of frying, which the fantastic electricity is sending forth, hundreds of leagues away. It flickers, ceases, begins again; you would say a goblin symphony in some wide wilderness, and yet the least of these vibrations is a message of war, of life and of death. And indeed they are careful not to talk without saying anything. They all use only secret languages. This perpetual chatter contains no word, no phrase which any one can understand unless he possesses the key on which rests the safety of ships. Cipher, cipher, cipher, nothing. OVER THE TOP WITH THE AMERICANS IN THE FOREIGN LEGION _Told by Donald R. Thane, of the Foreign Legion of France_ Back from the trenches, where he fought in the Foreign Legion of France, Donald R. Thane, an American boy, was wounded and "gassed" all in the same day. Mr. Thane has seen Mars in his blackest moods; he has seen him at play and laughs at some of the grim jests of the war god. His gossip of the trenches--or rather some of it--just as he told it, nervously, and coughing now and then, for his lungs are still raw from the gas, gives an American boy's view of the war and what is going on "out there."--Courtesy of the _New York Herald_. I--STORY OF AN AMERICAN BOY IN FRANCE I was walking through Belgium when the war started. Things began to get hot and I went over to Paris. It was there that I enlisted in the Foreign Legion. Why did I do it? Well, I'm not going to pull anything about wanting to rescue France, or being fired by the flame of liberty or anything like that. They asked a negro prizefighter--an American--the same thing. He ruefully regarded the many bandages that adorned his more or less mangled body, and said: "Well, sah, I guess mah curiosity got de best ob mah good sense." Looking back on it, he answered for me, too.