And quite apart from actual danger, the linesman's life is a troubled one. As one never knows when the lines may not be required in a hurry, telephonists and linesmen relieve one another day and night. Every few minutes the stations ring one another up, and if no reply can be obtained, the linesman at the calling station starts along the line to find the fault and repair it. It may be that the wire has been cut by shell-fire, or by accidents inherent to its nature, or by the sinful practices of others. Or again, it may sometimes happen that the linesman proceeds on his way, testing as he goes, and finding all correct, until at last he reaches the other station, to discover that the operator there has for some reason disconnected his instrument and forgotten to connect it up again, in which case a lurid and fiery scene takes place, consisting of picturesque recrimination on the part of the outraged linesman, and no less picturesque expostulation on the part of the telephonist, to the effect that it was somebody else's fault. The acrimony displayed varies directly as the temper of the disputants and the distance between the two stations. It is extremely difficult to train men to use a telephone intelligently, far more so than to teach them the mere technical details of its construction. Because the thing appears to talk, very few people can resist the impulse to treat it as a sentient being, intentionally perverse for the express purpose of annoyance. Ring up your best friend in peace time on a slightly defective instrument and observe how he or she treats the irresponsive toy. If a man, he will grow purple in the face and swear, he may even end by casting the offending thing on the ground and trampling upon it in his fury, if a woman she will grow tearful and excessively petulant, and will certainly pour the vials of her wrath upon you, as being the proximate cause of the trouble. Even so in time of war it is the tendency of the trained telephonist to use harsh words and report the instrument out of action instead of sitting down quietly and finding the cause of the trouble, which he knows perfectly well how to do. Even the best of them can never refrain from shaking the receiver viciously by way of punctuating every sentence, they having been rashly taught by their instructor that a gentle tap on the speaking end of the concern is often useful if speech is faint. And even when this tendency to violence, apparently a component of human nature, is eradicated, there comes the surpassing difficulty of inducing men to speak clearly and distinctly. Of course men of clear speech must be selected in the first place, the uncouth dialects of certain parts of the United Kingdom being not susceptible to the gentlest treatment. For instance, two telephonists, one hailing from Glasgow and the other from the wilds of Glamorgan, will utterly fail to make themselves intelligible to one another. On one occasion a certain dour Scotch subaltern was told to