ceive their assignments
by telephone, and their salaries by mail. There are even a few who are
allowed to telephone their news directly to a swift linotype operator,
who clicks it into type on his machine, without the scratch of a pencil.
This, of course, is the ideal method of news-gathering, which is rarely
possible.

A paper of the first class, such as The New York World, has now an
outfit of twenty trunk lines and eighty telephones. Its outgoing calls
are two hundred thousand a year and its incoming calls three hundred
thousand, which means that for every morning, evening, or Sunday
edition, there has been an average of seven hundred and fifty messages.
The ordinary newspaper in a small town cannot afford such a service,
but recently the United Press has originated a cooperative method. It
telephones the news over one wire to ten or twelve newspapers at one
time. In ten minutes a thousand words can in this way be flung out to a
dozen towns, as quickly as by telegraph and much cheaper.

But it is in a dangerous crisis, when safety seems to hang upon a
second, that the telephone is at its best. It is the instrument of
emergencies, a sort of ubiquitous watchman. When the girl operator in
the exchange hears a cry for help--"Quick! The hospital!" "The fire
department!" "The police!" she seldom waits to hear the number. She
knows it. She is trained to save half-seconds. And it is at such
moments, if ever, that the users of a telephone can appreciate its
insurance value. No doubt, if a King Richard III were worsted on a
modern battlefield, his instinctive cry would be, "My Kingdom for a
telephone!"

When instant action is needed in the city of New York, a General Alarm
can in five minutes be sent by the police wires over its whole vast
area of three hundred square miles. When, recently, a gas main broke in
Brooklyn, sixty girls were at once called to the centrals in that part
of the city to warn the ten thousand families who had been placed in
danger. When the ill-fated General Slocum caught fire, a mechanic in a
factory on the water-front saw the blaze, and had the presence of mind
to telephone the newspapers, the hospitals, and the police. When a small
child is lost, or a convict has escaped from prison, or the forest is
on fire, or some menace from the weather is at hand, the telephone bells
clang out the news, just as the nerves jangle the bells of pain when
the body is in danger. In one tragic case, the operator in