Various

“ In a word, the whole difference of the spirit in which we meet the facts of Christmas depends on the good or ill humour with which we are naturally endowed, and which we have cultivated by common-sense on the one hand, or suffered to ride rough-shod over our reason on the other. If we are unselfish and sympathetic, Christmas-time is as pleasant to us as popular tradition would make it; if we are egotistical and peevish, it is a wearisome infliction and a sham which no honest man can pretend to believe in, nor any sensible one to admire. ”

“ In the morning, when wearied and nervously feverish from want of sleep, you go into the garden for a little quiet and delectation, you find your greenhouses stripped of the flowers which you had been lovingly watching for weeks, and your evergreens as ridiculously cropped as a shaved poodle. This is the day for the decoration of the church, and you, having made an expensive hobby of your garden, have to contribute what has cost months and good money to rear, for the childish satisfaction of John and Joan, lasting just two hours and five minutes. ”

“ Who on earth, he says with his hands in his pockets, his back to the fire and his kindly smiling face to the room, who on earth can grumble at the facts of Christmas-time? For his part he finds it the jolliest season of the year, and he finds each season as jolly as the other, and all perfect in their own appointed way. He is none of your crying philosophers who go through life bewailing its miseries and oppressed by its misfortunes. Not he! He thinks the earth beautiful, men and women pleasant, and God very good ”

“ Suppose anything happened to me, Ralph, what would become of Louise?'
'You speak of what I hope may be far distant, mother,' he answered tenderly. 'But why should you be uneasy about her? In the event of her not marrying, she would always have a home here with me.'
Mrs Loraine shook her head. 'Turn round and look in the glass,' she said; 'thirty-nine is not such a very formidable age.'
He turned, and contemplated his bronzed face in the glass; such a handsome, noble face, telling of a nature that could not act falsely or meanly. ”

“ As if your nights were not sufficiently broken by the horrible compounds which trouble your digestion and disturb your brain, torturers known as the 'waits' prowl through the streets from midnight to dawn, causing you agonies beyond those which even the hurdy-gurdy men inflict. You are just falling to sleep—painfully courted and hardly won—when a hideous discord worse than the wailings of cats startles you into a nervous wakefulness which banishes all hope for that night. ”

“ You complain of indigestion and grumble at the monotony of your Christmas fare?—That is strange! Who can grumble at good plain succulent meat?—and why do you eat the sweets if they disagree with you? Neither pudding nor mince-pie comes into the eternal necessities of things, and you would do very well if only you would refrain. He does not eat things that he cannot digest, and in consequence he sleeps well, and when he wakes has neither regret nor remorse. ”

“ This is the food set before unoffending citizens under the name and style of Christmas dinners for the month or six weeks during which the idiotic custom of Christmas dinners at all is supposed to last. You are expected to live in this monotony of dyspepsia and antipathetic diet till you loathe the very sight of the familiar food, and long for a change with a vehemence which makes you ashamed of yourself, and more than half afraid that you are developing into a gourmand of the worst kind. ”

“ From the conventional greeting to the orthodox dinner—from the 'seasonable gifts' that are more obligatory than voluntary, to the toast that heralds the punch, and the dreams that follow on that last glass—all is so much pain to the flesh and weariness to the spirit ”

“ And when they fail—as they do at times—why, to fail is human, and are they alone of all mankind to be blameless and never swerving in the right way? And are they alone of all mankind to be judged of by their worst and not by their best?—to be blamed for failure, but not praised for well-doing? ”

“ The greetings over, they sat down side by side, talking, as those talk after long separation, of past, present, and future; of their acquaintances married, dead, or far away; of things on the estate, prosperous or failures; of the ball to be given next month, of the one they were going to, to-night; of how much Emma was improved since she 'came out,' how Katharine was considered one of the handsomest girls in the place, and how she might marry Sir Michael Leyland with thirty thousand a year if she liked. ”

“ If you in your warm bed, well fed, well clothed, prosperous altogether, fret at the loss of an hour's sleep, what must these poor fellows feel, out in the cold frosty night, with the wind blowing and the sleet falling fast, and they not half fed nor a quarter clothed? ”

“ For our own part we believe in Christmas, because we believe in the kindness of man to man, in genial good-humour, in unselfishness, and the liking of wholesome natures to give happiness; and so far as we have gone yet we have seen no reason to change our views. ”

“ Not only have you lost your flowers and your evergreens—that splendid holly, which yesterday glowed like a flame, today nothing but a bundle of chopped ends!—but you know that your favourite daughter is flirting with the curate, and that a great deal is going on under cover of wreaths and crosses, laurustinus and chrysanthemum, of which you strongly disapprove yet cannot check. It is Christmas-time; decorating the church has become in these later days a kind of religious duty ”

“ By accomplishing his task, he has placed himself at the head of all the famous pedestrians the world has known; and we trust that this fact will be sufficient to satisfy his craving after what is at best but ephemeral fame.
Men have on many occasions attempted walking feats which required a vast amount of physical endurance, and have failed from their utter inability to go without the natural quantum of sleep; but Gale has not only shewn himself to be possessed of the former, but to be altogether independent of the latter. ”

“ The emergence of telegraphy from the domain of experiment into that of daily practical use is a fact so undoubted, and one with which we are now so familiar, that it is impossible to say at what moment the telephone, at present a scientific toy, may become a daily necessity not only of telegraphic but of ordinary commercial work. ”

“ The hours passed on, the blazing sun arose, and Ralph went out into the burning glare with bent head and staggering footsteps, while words he had heard long since seemed floating round him in letters of fire: 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.'—'Is there none greater?' he thought. ”

“ The tradespeople, too, do fairly well, and—they must have their profit like any one else! Those Christmas-boxes to their lads may be the nest-eggs for future savings; and even if they do go in a little finery or personal pleasure instead—young people will be young, and his own boys are fond of being smart and amused: so why not these others? ”

“ When we apply our mouth to the bell-shaped end of the apparatus, and speak or shout or sing, we set the diaphragm vibrating as in a tuning-fork; the vibrations thus created are electrically communicated through the wire to a distant telephone, and are repeated on its diaphragm with more or less distinctness.
It is known that the motion of an iron plate contiguous to the poles of a magnet creates a disturbance of electricity in coils surrounding those poles; and the duration of this current will coincide with the vibratory motion of the plate or diaphragm. ”

“ The girl is a nice girl enough, but she has been badly brought up—had a lot of false ideas instilled into her by a foolish mother—but when she has been away from the old influences, and associated with themselves for a little while, she will open her eyes and see things in their right light. ”

“ Actual contact of one wire with another would spoil the business altogether. A wire bearing an electric current seems to be for the time surrounded, to an undefined distance, by an electric atmosphere, and all wires coming within this atmosphere have a current in an opposite direction set up in them. This is as near an explanation of the phenomena of induction as the state of telegraph science at present affords. Now the telephone works with a very delicate magnetic{813} current, and is easily overpowered by the action of a stronger current in any wire near which the telephone wire may come. ”

“ Or the advent of your married daughter with her two spoilt babies, who cry if they are looked at and want everything that they see, and that very objectionable young man her husband, with his ultra opinions and passion for argument, whom she would marry in spite of all that you could say, but to whom you can scarcely force yourself to be decently civil, not to speak of cordial, and whose presence is a perpetual blister while it lasts? ”

“ But for the most part you do not believe in his mirth; and then you despise him still more as a hypocrite as well. For a hypocrite shamming folly is an offender against reason as well as truth, whom you find it hard to forgive, let the motive of his mummery be what it may. ”

“ Every syllable, and every turn of melody of such a song as My Mother bids me bind my Hair, sung by a lady at one end, or When the Heart of a Man, sung at the other, could be distinctly heard, but with the effect before noticed, that the voice was muffled or shut in, as if the singer were in a cellar, while it was not always possible to say at once whether the voice was that of a man or a woman. ”

“ He remembers his own youth and how happy it made him to come home and racket; and he supposes that his lads are very much the same as he was at their age. He thinks too that they do the girls good—wake them up a little—and while not making them rough or rude—the mother takes care of that—yet that they prevent them from becoming prim and missy, as girls are apt to be who have no brothers and are left too much to themselves. ”

“ The great feat which has thus been accomplished without the aid of artificial training, is a marvellous instance of what human endurance, allied with courage and determination, can effect; though of what particular benefit it may be to the world at large it is utterly impossible to imagine.
Since the preceding account was written, Gale has accomplished a still more extraordinary feat, and one which for strength of will and physical endurance far surpasses his previous efforts. ”

“ In the evening the mouse would often run about the room and under the door into the corridor and adjoining rooms, and then return to its own hearth. After amusing us for nearly a month, it disappeared; and we suspect it was caught in a trap set in one of the rooms beyond. The mouse was small and had very large ears, which it moved about much whilst singing. The song was not unlike that of the canary in many of its trills, and it sang quite{815} as beautifully as any canary, but it had more variety, and some of its notes were much lower, more like those of the bullfinch. ”

“ On applying the ear to a telephone joined into a circuit working in such an office a curious sound is heard, comparable most nearly to the sound of a pot boiling. But the practised ear could soon separate the boiling into distinct sounds. There was one masterful Morse instrument—probably on the wire lying nearest the one on which we were joined up—whose peremptory "click, cli-i-i-ck, click," representing "dot, dash, dot" on the printed slip we read from, could be heard over all. ”

“ When it is remembered that the principle of the telephone is that the sound-caused vibrations in the filmy diaphragm at one end create similar but magnetically-caused vibrations in the diaphragm at the other end, and so reproduce the sound, it will be obvious why the rapid roll of the A B C currents, or the swift sending of the fast-speed transmitter, when brought by induction into the telephone wire, cause disturbances in the sound vibrations, and thereby cripple the instrument. ”

“ IS THE TELEPHONE A PRACTICAL SUCCESS?
SINGING MICE.
USING UP WASTE SUBSTANCES.
LET BYGONES BE BYGONES.
CHRISTMAS-TIME.
'So many men so many minds' has been a proverb long before our days, and will be to the end of time and human history; and uniformity of sentiment is the one thing which men need never hope to attain.
Christmas-time is one of these battle-fields of feeling. To some it is just the consecration of so many circumstances of torture; to others the meeting-point of so many facts of pleasure. ”

“ Although some of the cottony fibre may be separated through a sieve, so much adheres to the seed-husk as to render it unsuitable for paper-making, for which it has often been tried. The suggestion now made is, that though unfitted for paper, this refuse may possibly be found useful in the manufacture of millboard. Large quantities of this tough and durable product are employed for bookbinding, for making the discs of railway wheels, &c.; and as colour is not a matter of moment, the idea is that the mingled residue of cottony fibre and seed-husk might be rendered available. ”

“ None will begrudge Gale his well-earned reward; but it is to be hoped that such exhibitions will in future be discountenanced by the general public, as they not only detract from the dignity of man, but are needless and unwarrantable in a country which, we trust, will ever pride itself on a nobler civilisation than that which is founded upon mere physical endurance. ”

“ When, therefore, the human voice (or any other suitable sound) impinges through the tube against this diaphragm, the diaphragm begins to vibrate, and awakens, so to speak, electrical action in the coils of wire surrounding the poles of the magnet; not a current, but a series of undulations, something like those produced by the voice in the air around us. In short the telephone is an apparatus designed to transmit sound through a wire of indefinite length ”

“ We must live and let live, he says with his broad smile; and if we are sometimes a little inconvenienced by the efforts made by the poor to accomplish the art of living for their own parts—we must remember that our loss is their gain, and that they are men and women like ourselves—fathers of families who want to keep the pot boiling and the fire alight—mothers who love their children, and are anxious to do the best for them that nature and man will allow. ”