little boy.

"There is no class," he said, "whose burdens the phonograph has done so
much to lighten as parents. Mothers no longer have to make themselves
hoarse telling the children stories on rainy days to keep them out of
mischief. It is only necessary to plant the most roguish lad before a
phonograph of some nursery classic, to be sure of his whereabouts and
his behavior till the machine runs down, when another set of cylinders
can be introduced, and the entertainment carried on. As for the babies,
Patti sings mine to sleep at bedtime, and, if they wake up in the night,
she is never too drowsy to do it over again. When the children grow
too big to be longer tied to their mother's apron-strings, they still
remain, thanks to the children's indispensable, though out of her sight,
within sound of her voice. Whatever charges or instructions she desires
them not to forget, whatever hours or duties she would have them be sure
to remember, she depends on the indispensable to remind them of."

At this I cried out. "It is all very well for the mothers," I said,
"but the lot of the orphan must seem enviable to a boy compelled to wear
about such an instrument of his own subjugation. If boys were what
they were in my day, the rate at which their indispensables would get
unaccountably lost or broken would be alarming."

Hamage laughed, and admitted that the one he was carrying home was the
fourth he had bought for his boy within a month. He agreed with me that
it was hard to see how a boy was to get his growth under quite so much
government; but his wife, and indeed the ladies generally, insisted that
the application of the phonograph to family government was the greatest
invention of the age.

Then I asked a question which had repeatedly occurred to me that day,--
What had become of the printers?

"Naturally," replied Hamage, "they have had a rather hard time of it.
Some classes of books, however, are still printed, and probably will
continue to be for some time, although reading, as well as writing, is
getting to be an increasingly rare accomplishment."

"Do you mean that your schools do not teach reading and writing?" I
exclaimed.

"Oh, yes, they are still taught; but as the pupils need them little
after leaving school,--or even in school, for that matter, all their
text-books being phonographic,--they usually keep the acquirements
about as long as a college graduate does his Greek. There is a strong
movement already