thousand families, to put the telephone wires in place and protect them The wire chiefs must detect trouble under a thousand disguises. Perhaps to every family in the United States; and these lines are not punctuated interlocking unit, a living, conscious being, half human and half or improved by a sort of vivisection while it is working. It is an a cable. Perhaps some self-reliant citizen has moved his own telephone with clothespins, but with the most delicate of electrical instruments. And just as the particles of a human body change every six or seven of his ordinary week's work, would in itself make a lively book slopes of mountains, massing them in cities and fluffing them out among fatal moisture upon an unwiped joint. Or perhaps a submarine cable has from one room to another. Perhaps a sudden rainstorm has splashed its It cannot be picked up and put into a dry-dock. It must be repaired clothes-line of a hundred yards to operate, has often enough trouble and their men, a corps of human spiders, endlessly spinning threads against innumerable dangers. This is the profession of the wire chiefs machine; and an injury in any one place may cause a pain or sickness to of adventures. Even a washerwoman, with one lone, non-electrical with it. But the wire chiefs of the Bell telephone have charge of as much wire as would make TWO HUNDRED MILLION CLOTHES-LINES--ten apiece been sat upon by the Lusitania and flattened to death. But no matter a small boy has thrown a snake across the wires or driven a nail into its whole vast body. years, without disturb-ing the body, so the particles of our telephone farms and villages. To tell the doings of a wire chief, in the course what the trouble, a telephone system cannot be stopped for repairs. under streets and above green fields, on the beds of rivers and the