FullReads

[Footnote N: I am proud to say that such suggestions have had so much weight, that in 1868 the alarm strikes the number of the box which first telegraphs danger, six-four, six-four, etc., six being the district number, and four the box number in that district.]

This is what might be, if the magnetic alarm only struck long and short, and we had all learned Morse’s alphabet. Indeed, there is nothing the bells could not tell, if you would only give them time enough. We have only one chime, for musical purposes, in the town. But, without attempting tunes, only give the bells the Morse alphabet, and every bell in Boston might chant in monotone the words of “Hail Columbia” at length, every Fourth of July. Indeed, if Mr. Barnard should report any day that a discouraged ‘prentice-boy had left town for his country home, all the bells could instantly be set to work to speak articulately, in language regarding which the dullest imagination need not be at loss,

“Turn again, Higginbottom,
Lord Mayor of Boston!”

I have suggested the propriety of introducing this alphabet into the primary schools. I need not say I have taught it to my own children,–and I have been gratified to see how rapidly it made head, against the more complex alphabet, in the grammar schools. Of course it does;–an alphabet of two characters matched against one of twenty-six,–or of forty-odd, as the very odd one of the phonotypists employ! On the Franklin-medal day I went to the Johnson-School examination. One of the committee asked a nice girl what was the capital of Brazil. The child looked tired and pale, and, for an instant, hesitated. But, before she had time to commit herself, all answering was rendered impossible by an awful turn of whooping-cough which one of my own sons was seized with,–who had gone to the examination with me. Hawm, hem hem;–hem hem hem;–hem, hem;–hawm, hem hem;–hem hem hem;–hem, hem,–barked the poor child, who was at the opposite extreme of the school-room. The spectators and the committee looked to see him fall dead with a broken blood-vessel. I confess that I felt no alarm, after I observed that some of his gasps were long and some very staccato;–nor did pretty little Mabel Warren. She recovered her color,–and, as soon as silence was in the least restored, answered, “Rio is the capital of Brazil,”–as modestly and properly as if she had been taught it in her cradle. They are nothing but children, any of them,–but that afternoon, after they had done all the singing the city needed for its annual entertainment of the singers, I saw Bob and Mabel start for a long expedition into West Roxbury,–and when he came back, I know it was a long featherfew, from her prize school-bouquet, that he pressed in his Greene’s “Analysis,” with a short frond of maiden’s hair.

I hope nobody will write a letter to “The Atlantic,” to say that these are very trifling uses. The communication of useful information is never trifling. It is as important to save a nice child from mortification on examination-day, as it is to tell Mr. Fremont that he is not elected President. If, however, the reader is distressed, because these illustrations do not seem to his more benighted observation to belong to the big bow-wow strain of human life, let him consider the arrangement which ought to have been made years since, for lee shores, railroad collisions, and that curious class of maritime accidents where one steamer runs into mother under the impression that she is a light house. Imagine the Morse alphabet applied to a steam-whistle, which is often heard five miles. It needs only long and short again. “Stop Comet,” for instance, when you send it down the railroad line, by the wire, is expressed thus:

… — . . ….,… . . — — . —