Law administration, public
health, and the general control of the authorities established by the
Local Government Act. There were several purely ornamental posts, at good
salaries, on the board, and there were plenty of inefficients holding
office. The first day of Burns's tenure he called his private secretary, a
man holding office from the previous administration, and started to
dictate letters.

"You're going much too fast," the man protested, "I really can't keep up
with you."

"How many words do you write a minute?" Burns asked.

"Words a minute?" echoed the man in a puzzled voice. "Really, I never
counted."

"You don't mean to say you're not a stenographer!"

The man was shocked to think that he should be looked upon as a
stenographer. He was private secretary to the president of the Local
Government Board, and nothing else.

"See here," said Burns, "this office has work to do, and you won't be of
much use to me unless you know shorthand. I'll give you every afternoon
off to learn it. I expect that it will take you three months. Till then I
suppose I'll have to put up with slower methods."

BELL AND THE TELEPHONE.

Scottish-American Inventor Had Hard
Work to Convince Them the Telephone
Was Anything More than a Toy.

Alexander Graham Bell, whose discoveries contributed largely to the
commercial success of the telephone, had been known only as a teacher of
deaf-mutes previous to the time he took out his telephone patents. He had
been a teacher in Scotland, his native country, and when he emigrated to
America it was with the intention of continuing to teach here. The system
he used was one of his own, and from the first he got good results from
the most difficult cases.

Important as this work was, he could earn nothing more than a scanty
living. Soon even this income was threatened, for he began to devote more
and more time to the study of sound-transmission, and in order to make a
living at all by teaching it was necessary to devote his entire time to
it.

At the Centennial Exhibition, in Philadelphia, he showed a crude model of
a telephone, but it attracted only passing notice from capitalists, though
eminent scientists predicted a future for it. The results were not what
Bell looked for, but he took up the work again, made some improvements,
and took out patents covering the principal features of the telephone as
it is to-day.

Three hours after he filed his application Elisha Gray filed