d modern lover
may well wonder how his great-grandfather and great-grandmother
supported the days, or even kept their love alive, on such famine
rations as a letter once a month. A letter once a month! They must have
had enormous faith in each other, those lovers of old-time, or they must
have suffered as we can hardly bear to think of--we, who write to each
other twice a day, telegraph three times, telephone six, and transmit a
phonographic record of our sighs to each other night and morn. The
telephone has made a toy of distance and made of absence, in many cases,
a sufficient presence. It is almost worth while to be apart on occasion
just for the sake of bringing each other so magically near. It is the
Arabian Nights come true. As in them, you have only to say a word, and
the jinn of the electric fire is waiting for your commands. The word
has changed. Once it was "Abracadabra." Now it is "Central." But the
miracle is just the same.

One might almost venture upon the generalization that most tragedies
have come about from lack of a telephone. Of course, there are
exceptions, but as a rule tragedies happen through delays in
communication.

If there had been a telephone in Mantua, Romeo would never have bought
poison of the apothecary. Instead, he would have asked leave to use his
long-distance telephone. Calling up Verona, he would first cautiously
disguise his voice. If, as usual, the old nurse answered, all well; but
if a bearded voice set all the wires a-trembling, he would, of course,
hastily ring off, and abuse "Central" for giving him the wrong number.
And "Central" would understand. Then Romeo would wait an hour or two
till he was sure that Lord Capulet had gone to the Council, and ring up
again. This time he would probably get the nurse and confide to her his
number in Mantua. Next morning Juliet and her nurse had only to drop in
at the nearest drug store, and confide to Romeo the whole plot which
Balthazar so sadly bungled. All that was needed was a telephone, and
Romeo would have understood that Juliet was only feigning death for the
sake of life with him.

But, as in the case of our Danish knight, there was not a pay-station
as yet in all the wide world, and it was fully five hundred years
to the nearest telegraph office. Another point in this tragedy is
worth considering by the modern mind: that not only would the final
catastrophe have been averted by the telephone, but that those beautiful
speeches t