Folsom, New
Mexico, refused to quit her post until she had warned her people of a
flood that had broken loose in the hills above the village. Because of
her courage, nearly all were saved, though she herself was drowned at
the switchboard. Her name--Mrs. S. J. Rooke--deserves to be remembered.

If a disaster cannot be prevented, it is the telephone, usually, that
brings first aid to the injured. After the destruction of San Francisco,
Governor Guild, of Massachusetts, sent an appeal for the stricken city
to the three hundred and fifty-four mayors of his State; and by the
courtesy of the Bell Company, which carried the messages free, they were
delivered to the last and furthermost mayors in less than five hours.
After the destruction of Messina, an order for enough lumber to build
ten thousand new houses was cabled to New York and telephoned to Western
lumbermen. So quickly was this order filled that on the twelfth day
after the arrival of the cablegram, the ships were on their way to
Messina with the lumber. After the Kansas City flood of 1903, when the
drenched city was without railways or street-cars or electric lights,
it was the telephone that held the city together and brought help to the
danger-spots. And after the Baltimore fire, the telephone exchange was
the last force to quit and the first to recover. Its girls sat on their
stools at the switchboard until the window-panes were broken by the
heat. Then they pulled the covers over the board and walked out.
Two hours later the building was in ashes. Three hours later another
building was rented on the unburned rim of the city, and the wire chiefs
were at work. In one day there was a system of wires for the use of the
city officials. In two days these were linked to long-distance wires;
and in eleven days a two-thousand-line switchboard was in full working
trim. This feat still stands as the record in rebuilding.

In the supreme emergency of war, the telephone is as indispensable, very
nearly, as the cannon. This, at least, is the belief of the Japanese,
who handled their armies by telephone when they drove back the Russians.
Each body of Japanese troops moved forward like a silkworm, leaving
behind it a glistening strand of red copper wire. At the decisive battle
of Mukden, the silk-worm army, with a million legs, crept against the
Russian hosts in a vast crescent, a hundred miles from end to end. By
means of this glistening red wire, the various batteries and r