There is no disorder, no discord, in these messages. Just as with the players in a well directed orchestra, all the speakers speak on the minute, at the very instant they should; watch in hand, the telegraphers wait for their moment, and at the highest speed send their dashes, short and long; at the end of their period whether they have finished or not, they stop and wait, for immediately a distant voice begins to play its tune, and would complain violently if someone prevented its talking. The Mediterranean is divided into sectors, and the time distributed between them, so that no one is allowed to speak if the schedule requires him to be silent. Offenders, moreover, are soon recognized. Just as the finger of a blind man acquires surprising sensibility, the telegraphers come to know the timber, sharpness of tone and musical richness of these babblers they have never seen. For the initiated the electric radiations have a personality like human talk. Two stations, two ships, have distinct voices and deliveries. This one sputters, that one speaks slowly and gravely; the sound of one resembles a match struck on sand paper, another buzzes like a fly, another sings sharply like a mosquito. It is a magic concert. In his padded cabin the receiver hears and makes out the whisperings of the grasshopper, the scrapings of violins, the rattle of beetles, the frying of boiling oil, all the sounds which the fantastic electricity reproduces hundreds of miles away. It jumps, stops, recommences; one would call it a symphony of goblins in a boundless land. And yet the least of these vibrations is a messenger of war, of life, or of death. They are careful to use secret languages. There is not a word or phrase in this continual interchange which anyone could interpret without the keys upon which depends the safety of the ships. Nothing but cipher circulates through the air. All the combinations which the human mind could invent, all the ingenuities devised by specialists, have been prepared beforehand. We improve on the arrangements of ciphers; for fear that the enemy, after receiving pages and pages of ciphered texts, will succeed in forcing the lock, the “naval army” does not long maintain the same keys. It modifies them, turns them about, rubs them down; and the officers in charge of the translation are like travelers who change languages at every frontier. * * * * *