how to read your letter."

I gave him the box, from which he took a device of spindles and
cylinders, and placed it deftly within another small box which stood
on the desk. Attached to this was one of the two-pronged ear-trumpets I
already knew the use of. As I placed it in position, the clerk touched
a spring in the box, which set some sort of motor going, and at once
the familiar tones of Dick Haulage's voice expressed his regret that an
accident had prevented his meeting me the night before, and informed me
that he would be at the hotel by the time I had breakfasted.

The letter ended, the obliging clerk removed the cylinders from the box
on the desk, replaced them in that they had come in, and returned it to
me.

"Is n't it rather tantalizing," said I, "to receive one of these letters
when there is no little machine like this at hand to make it speak?"

"It does n't often happen," replied the clerk, "that anybody is caught
without his indispensable, or at least where he cannot borrow one."

"His indispensable!" I exclaimed: "What may that be?"

In reply the clerk directed my attention to a little box, not wholly
unlike a case for a binocular glass, which, now that he spoke of it, I
saw was carried, slung at the side, by every person in sight.

"We call it the indispensable because it is indispensable, as, no doubt,
you will soon find for yourself."

In the breakfast-room a number of ladies and gentlemen were engaged as
they sat at table in reading, or rather in listening to, their morning's
correspondence. A greater or smaller pile of little boxes lay beside
their plates, and one after another they took from each its cylinders,
placed them in their indispensables, and held the latter to their ears.
The expression of the face in reading is so largely affected by the
necessary fixity of the eyes that intelligence is absorbed from the
printed or written page with scarcely a change of countenance, which
when communicated by the voice evokes a responsive play of features. I
had never been struck so forcibly by this obvious reflection as I was in
observing the expression of the faces of these people as they listened
to their correspondents. Disappointment, pleased surprise, chagrin,
disgust, indignation, and amusement were alternately so legible on their
faces that it was perfectly easy for one to be sure in most cases what
the tenor at least of the letter was. It occurred to me that while in
the old time the ple