ined to you--which was fifteen
or eighteen years ago, when telegraphic time and train time between the
mentioned points was exactly the same, to-wit, three hours and a half.
Six days ago--it was that raw day which provoked so much comment--my
daughter was on her way up from New York, and at noon she telegraphed
me from New Haven asking that I meet her with a cloak at Portsmouth. Her
telegram reached me four hours and a quarter later--just 15 minutes too
late for me to catch my train and meet her.

I judge that the telegram traveled about 200 miles. It is the best
telegraphic work I have seen since I have been here, and I am mentioning
it in this place not as a complaint but as a compliment. I think a
compliment ought always to precede a complaint, where one is possible,
because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteous
and gentle reception.

Still, there is a detail or two connected with this matter which ought
perhaps to be mentioned. And now, having smoothed the way with the
compliment, I will venture them. The head corpse in the York Harbor
office sent me that telegram altho (1) he knew it would reach me too
late to be of any value; (2) also, that he was going to send it to me
by his boy; (3) that the boy would not take the trolley and come the 2
miles in 12 minutes, but would walk; (4) that he would be two hours
and a quarter on the road; (5) and that he would collect 25 cents for
transportation, for a telegram which the he knew to be worthless before
he started it. From these data I infer that the Western Union owes me
75 cents; that is to say, the amount paid for combined wire and land
transportation--a recoup provided for in the printed paragraph which
heads the telegraph-blank.

By these humane and Christian stages we now arrive at the complaint
proper. We have had a grave case of illness in the family, and a
relative was coming some six hundred miles to help in the sick-room
during the convalescing period. It was an anxious time, of course, and I
wrote and asked to be notified as to the hour of the expected arrival
of this relative in Boston or in York Harbor. Being afraid of the
telegraph--which I think ought not to be used in times of hurry and
emergency--I asked that the desired message be brought to me by some
swift method of transportation. By the milkman, if he was coming this
way. But there are always people who think they know more than you do,
especially young people; so of cou