wo haven't spoken for three
years. She knows just who of our citizens telephone to Paynesville when
Homeburg goes dry, and order books, shoes, eggs, and hard-boiled shirts
from the saloons up there to be sent by express in a plain package. She
knows who calls up Lutie Briggs every night or two from Paynesville, and
young Billy Madigan would give worlds for the information, reserving
only enough for a musket or some other duelling weapon. She knows how
hard it is for one of our supposedly prosperous families to get credit
and how long they have to talk to the grocer before he will subside for
another month.

There's very little that Carrie doesn't know. I shudder to think what
would happen if Carrie should get miffed and begin to divulge. Once we
had a telephone girl who did this. She was a pert young thing who had
come to town with her family a short time before. It was a mistake to
hire her--telephone girls should be watched and tested for discretion
from babyhood up--but our directors did it, and because she showed a
passion for literature and gum and very little for work, they fired her
in three months. She left with reluctance, but she talked with
enthusiasm; and Homeburg was an armed camp for a long time.

Goodness knows we have enough trouble with our telephone even with
Carrie to supply discretion for the whole town. Party lines and rubber
ears are the source of all our woe. You know what a party line is, of
course. It's a line on which you can have a party and gab merrily back
and forth for forty minutes, while some other subscriber is wildly
dancing with impatience. Most of our lines have four subscribers apiece,
and it's just as hard to live in friendliness on a party line as it is
for four families to get along good-naturedly in the same house.

There's Mrs. Sim Askinson, for instance. She's a good woman and her pies
have produced more deep religious satisfaction at the Methodist church
socials than many a sermon. But St. Peter himself couldn't live on the
same telephone line with her. She's polite and refined in any other way,
but when she gets on a telephone line she's a hostile monopolist. Early
in the morning she grabs it and holds it fiercely against all comers,
while talking with her friends about the awful time she had the night
before when the cold water faucet in the kitchen began to drip. Mrs.
Askinson can talk an hour on this fertile subject, stopping each minute
or two to say, with the most corr