atson felt something
must be done to stifle the shouting he foresaw he would be compelled to
do at that nocturnal hour. So he gathered together all the blankets and
rolled them into a sort of cone and to the small end of this he tied
his telephone. Then he crept into this stuffy, breathless shelter, the
ancestor of our sound-proof telephone booth, and for nearly three hours
shouted to Mr. Bell in New York--or tried to. But the experiment was
not a success. He could be heard, it is true, but not distinctly enough
to risk such an unsatisfactory demonstration before an uninitiated
audience. Hence the scheme was abandoned and Mr. Watson scrambled his
things together and betook himself to a point nearer the center of
action."

"It must all have been great fun, mustn't it?" said Laurie
thoughtfully.

"Great fun, no doubt, but very hard work," was the tutor's answer.
"Many a long, discouraging hour was yet to follow before the telephone
became a factor in the everyday world. Yet each step of the climb to
success had its sunlight as well as its shadow, its humor as well as
its pathos; and it was fortunate both men appreciated this fact for it
floated them over many a rough sea. Man can spare almost any other
attribute better than his sense of humor. Without this touchstone he is
ill equipped to battle with life," concluded Mr. Hazen whimsically.

CHAPTER XI

THE REST OF THE STORY

"I should think," commented Laurie one day, when Ted and Mr. Hazen were
sitting in his room, "that Mr. Bell's landlady would have fussed no end
to have his telephone ringing all the time."

"My dear boy, you do not for an instant suppose that the telephones of
that period had bells, do you?" replied Mr. Hazen with amusement. "No,
indeed! There was no method for signaling. Unless two persons agreed to
talk at a specified hour of the day or night and timed their
conversation by the clock, or else had recourse to the Morse code,
there was no satisfactory way they could call one another. This did not
greatly matter when you recollect how few telephones there were in
existence. Mr. Williams used to summon a listener by tapping on the
metal diaphragm of the instrument with his pencil, a practice none too
beneficial to the transmitter; nor was the resulting sound powerful
enough to reach any one who was not close at hand. Furthermore, persons
could not stand and hold their telephones and wait until they could
arouse the party at the other end