"I knew the thing couldn't be trusted," sputtered an old voter then. "As if the solid South were broken! I'll get my news some other way." And off he went.
"You didn't hear right, I fancy," said the lawyer, returning. "The operator couldn't have said that."
"But he did," insisted Arthur. "I'm sure he did."
"And why not?" quietly asked the school teacher from one corner of the room. "He means the town of Florida, not the state."
By 1883, Arthur heard that conversation had been carried on between New York and Chicago, cities one thousand miles apart. "That is all we can hope for," was the general verdict. For a long time it seemed true. But when the country had been covered by a network of wires, there came another long-distance triumph. Communication was open to Omaha, five hundred miles farther west.
And not long ago, Arthur, now a prosperous business man of fifty, a member of the City Club of Boston, sat with several associates around a table at the new club house, each with a telephone in front of him; and over the wires, across three thousand miles of mountain, lake, and prairie, came clearly the voices of the governor of Massachusetts and the mayor of Boston, speaking from the Panama Exposition at San Francisco.
What will be the next triumph of the telephone? To transmit speech around the globe, perhaps. Anyway, here is a newspaper paragraph that asks an interesting question:
"The _Mayflower_ has been called the last frail link binding the Pilgrims to man and habitable earth. With its departure from Plymouth in America that frail link was severed. The Atlantic cable has surely bound the countries together again. Will the telephone and the aeroplane make the desert of the Pilgrims a popular London suburb?"
"Uncle John, I've decided to go to Wellesley College."
"I'm glad to hear it, Dora. Have you money enough?"
"That's just the trouble, Uncle John. I have exactly twenty-four dollars that I've earned picking berries the last three summers. But I'm only eleven, you know, and I shan't try to go before I'm eighteen. That will give me seven more summers to work. Only I can never pay my college expenses if I can't earn more than eight dollars a summer."
"That's true, Dora. I wish I were rich enough to send you myself. But school teachers are not wealthy, you know."