Being a Typewriter

I AM moved to set down my reflections, because I believe the day is approaching when the typewriter — I have in mind the human being, and not the machine — shall have become nearly or quite extinct. Then this class of people, like the scribes of Jerusalem, will have a place assigned to them in history, and the records left by them will have a certain archaic interest. When it is remembered that the mechanical part of typewriting can be learned in a few days, and that, unlike music or shorthand, it imposes upon the student no system of representing ideas with which he is not already familiar, it does not take a great stretch of the imagination to suppose a time when whoever reads will run the typewriter; reversing not only the old saying, but the relations of typewriting to education and to society. It seems to me that as yet these relations are imperfectly understood. From all that has been said to me, I infer that most people imagine there would be no further need of typewriting if the necessity for speed were removed. This is a little like assuming that if dancing were prohibited there would be no further demand for music, — a gloomy outlook for all who play the piano and violin!

But, unlike the piano and violin, the typewriter was first used in the rush of business, and from this fact it has suffered almost as much as it has profited. Undoubtedly, its efficiency in affairs has been the immediate cause of its popularity ; but, unfortunately, business has too largely dictated its construction, and given it the character of a mere timesaver and makeshift. In literature its use is even now hardly more than an afterthought, and its structure is essentially different from what it would have been had literature first discovered its merits.

Is it not a little curious, when we reflect upon it, that a machine which is beginning to supplement the labors of clergymen, lecturers, and contributors to the magazines should continue to be constructed almost entirely in accordance with the demands of business ? Does it seem reasonable that the number of characters, the marks of punctuation, the entire typographical capacity of that piece of mechanism to which, directly or indirectly, the man of science confides his conclusions, should be prescribed by the flour merchant and the dealer in all kinds of property except manuscripts ? A language-lover, to whom no syllable of his native tongue is without charm and significance, from the most classic to the most colloquial of its utterances, falls to wondering what sort of typewriter would have found favor at Athens, supposing Hermes to have lighted upon the invention, and Athena to have seen fit to bestow it. A machine without accents and with the fewest possible marks of punctuation (for it is only at the request of the purchaser that luxuries like the dash, the diæresis, and the exclamation point are provided), a machine that discarded the breathings, as an additional expense or hindrance to speed, and in which the minimum of attention had been paid to typographical excellence, would hardly have met the requirements of a public which could not endure the mispronunciation of a word on the part of an actor. After a twofold experience, covering a fifth of my life, and enabling me to look at typewriting from the standpoint of literature as well as of business, I do not hesitate to say that the development of the art of typewriting — if for the moment I may so characterize a mechanical invention — has been retarded by half a century.

At the same time, I am far from forgetting that certain business houses — very often, yet not invariably, those of publishers — maintain a standard in letter-writing that many who make a profession of literature would do well to imitate. In neatness and verbal accuracy the average output of a business firm in New York will compare very favorably with the communications in typewriting received by the editor of a first-class journal. That these are too often specimens of what may be termed typewriting run wild is due not so much to the fact that ministers and men of genius are proverbially inconsequent, as to their inability to pay the salary or give the training that alone insures good work. It must also be taken into account that, as a rule, it is more difficult to prepare a brief article for publication than to transcribe a letter of almost any length; but as this is not clearly understood, even by those who are in the habit of employing an amanuensis, I shall have more to say about it later.

After all, the worst injury trade has dealt to the typewriter does not lie in liberties taken with language. If the tradesman cannot always capture the terse English of the military commander, still he is frank in acknowledging the delicacy of the tool he is handling, and if he happens to be a man of education his letters will often be admirably to the point. Even the merchant without education is aware of his inability to handle language, and according to his lights he is every whit as careful of his letters as of his cablegrams, though he may know that an error of statement will not cost him a sum of money. To my mind, the setback that the art of typewriting has received from business, and which is perhaps keeping the present machines as far behind the machine of the future as the clavichord and harpsichord fell behind the piano, is mainly owing to the supposition that speed is the chief end of typewriting, and not merely one of its many uses. There could hardly be a more telling illustration of the erroneous nineteenth-century notion that nothing is worth doing unless it can be done quickly. I observe that a high rate of speed in travel, in letter-writing, in reading aloud, in the acquirement of knowledge, is precisely most prevalent and highly prized in that country where the arts are least flourishing, or when they do put forth blossoms, as painting is now doing in America, are least appreciated. Our citizens who visit Japan are moved to wonder by the long days, the simplicity of life, the amount of leisure ; by shops that close at four in the afternoon, and houses which contain next to no furniture. They are furthermore impressed by the keen appreciation of the fitness of things in the lower classes, — by the workman who produces an exquisite bit of embroidery while claiming to be no artist: that the former phenomena have any bearing upon the latter seems not always to occur to my countrymen. Not long ago I confided to an American poet my intention of gathering into a little book a few choice examples of a kind of verse very popular with the Greeks, at one time popular in France, and of growing popularity in America. Nothing could have been more acute and sympathetic than his suggestions, till he spoilt it all by adding, “ And it would n’t take you very long to do it, either.” Substitute the slow processes of nature for the methods of commerce, in the arts as they are understood in America, and whatever may be the quality of what we are getting, there can be no doubt that it would be raised, and that, in spite of the apparent contradiction, a lower rate of production would prove an impetus. We are lost in wonder at the wilderness of carving in the cathedrals of mediæval Europe. Modern workmen, we say, would have no time for an outlay so multitudinous and minute ; yet it takes nature many more centuries to make a tropical forest, and longer to produce an apple from a blossom, than it took the mediæval workman to design and execute one of the oval projections in a piece of egg and tongue moulding. Perhaps, when so great an art as the art of painting lies at the feet of commerce, it may seem a light thing that typewriting should lie there, too ; but can anything so closely linked to language and identified with it fail to exert an influence over it that is worth our serious consideration ?

I would not be understood as undervaluing the importance of speed, either in shorthand or in typewriting; my point is merely that while speed is the main object of shorthand (and the only advantage, if I except the occasional convenience of a cipher or private record), in typewriting it is one of many advantages, among which, in my opinion, accuracy of record stands first. There is little doubt that if absolute accuracy of record were as easily attainable in shorthand as in typewriting, the English alphabet would be in a fair way to disappear, from commerce at any rate. But the truth is, although stenographers are not frank in acknowledging it, that shorthand is in its very nature incompatible with infallibility of record, for the reason that the same outline does not invariably mean the same word; hence, in order to interpret it, the man who made it, when he is ready to transcribe it, must have recourse to his memory or to the context.

I have sometimes amused myself by tracing a faint analogy between the notes of a stenographer and a problem in algebra only partly worked out. As in the problem x is employed, as a matter of momentary convenience, to represent some quantity not yet ascertained, and in the next problem may represent another quantity altogether, so in a page of shorthand a particular outline may mean any one of two or more words, that the stenographer runs over in his mind, unless his memory tells him which is the right one. In his struggles with shorthand a beginner is taken by surprise every time he attempts to read his notes. Outlines that seemed to him to mean only one thing when he employed them, in reality apply equally to several different words. It is all very well to put a white cross on the door of the house you wish to remember, as the dowager did in Hans Andersen’s fairy tale ; but what are you going to do if, on your return, you find every house in the street marked in a similar way ? Many outlines, it is true, can have only one interpretation : the outline that, in the system I use, is generally employed to represent cathedral could hardly stand for any other word with which I am familiar. But since the tendency of shorthand is to level all words and to express the greatest number of sounds by the fewest possible strokes; since in at least one system a can be distinguished from and, edge from age or advantage, I from eye, why, or high, only by the context, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the life of a stenographer is one long effort to dissociate words from outlines that fit them perfectly, but at the time of writing were intended for other words.

If a stenographer could afford the time to put in his vowels, or, in other words, to vocalize, the difficulty of interpreting his notes would be reduced by at least a third ; but, as a matter of fact, he occupies himself almost exclusively with the skeleton of the word he has in mind, leaving out the vowels, and reducing it to a string of consonants. The moment two words seemingly so different as cushion and action are deprived of their vowels, it is obvious that they become identical, and that the same outline will serve for both. The stenographer must then trust to his memory, or set up a distinction between cushion and action, either by vocalizing cushion and leaving action unvocalized, or by writing the former under the line and the latter above it, or by any other device or variation he happens to hit upon ; for personal whim enters very largely into the matter, and in a measure accounts for the inability of stenographers to read one another’s notes. In rare cases, stenographers using the same system and employed in the same office have been known to make out the notes of their associates ; but in every instance that has come under my immediate observation the illness of a secretary has rendered his notes valueless, and it has been necessary to await his recovery or to dictate the letters all over again to some one else. More than once a notebook has been handed me with the request to write out the letters contained in it ; this was a little like being asked to make an astronomical calculation inside of an hour. In other words, every stenographer builds his own block-house. At the start he is given a certain number of blocks carefully lettered, and these must not on any account be misplaced or ignored. But as soon as the foundation is laid he is thrown upon his own resources, and the chances are that through life he goes on developing, contracting, transposing, and otherwise modifying his outlines, precisely as the purist goes on pruning his sentences and looking sharply after his diction.

In most cases, the more expert a stenographer becomes, the less difference he makes between his outlines, the greater the number of sounds he finds it convenient to represent by the same stroke. The beginner in the system I use employs shading as a means of distinguishing between the strokes that stand for t and d, k and g, p and b, and so on. Many continue to shade as long as they write shorthand. Women, I think, give up shading more reluctantly than men, because women, in a way, feel more strongly the importance of details. But I have never used a particle of shading, and, as a rule, the expert cannot stop to shade ; so it comes about that his p and b are identical, and that he must rely solely on memory and context whenever, for example, it is necessary to distinguish cup from cub. It is obvious that in this instance even vocalization will not help him, and as the tendency of expert writing is always in the direction of abbreviation and contraction, it follows not infrequently that a stenographer’s rapidity in reading his notes is in an inverse ratio to his quickness in taking them. By comparing notes with other stenographers, I have found that I am not the only one who is in the habit of writing it, do, day, and dollar exactly alike ; that is, with a vertical stroke resting on the line. On the other hand, it came out, in a conversation I had with two women, that we all had different ways of writing history, each one holding firmly to the opinion that her way was the shortest.

At first blush it seems incredible that, after several years’ practice, a stenographer should experience even a moment’s embarrassment in reading his notes ; but suppose a page of ordinary long primer from which many of the consonants and all the vowels have been eliminated, with the exception of here and there a stray “ or a solitary i. Think of a page without paragraphs, possibly without a single period or other mark of punctuation, a page in which there are no capital letters, and where many of the outlines are joined together arbitrarily, as in the phrase, ithinkyouwillhave, or underthecircumstances, and then imagine yourself asked on a sudden to go back to the beginning of the last sentence but one. It is undoubtedly the business of an amanuensis to be able to detect the beginning of the last sentence but one with the inevitableness of a divining-rod ; but the perpetual dictator little dreams how largely the nimbleness of his stenographer is due to an effort of will, or to what extent the interpretation and transcription of notes is a matter of memory. A business man tells me he has come to the conclusion that a stenographer is like a pair of shoes, that give more trouble than satisfaction until they have been worn several days and have become perfectly fitted to the foot. I do not know whether he is aware that a new secretary’s first instinctive proceeding is to get hold of the words and phrases which constitute the ordinary vocabulary of the house. This, in comparison with the vocabulary of a clergyman or a novelist, is exceedingly limited ; and when the separate vocabularies and individual peculiarities of the heads of the firm have been mentally noted, the difficulty of taking their letters is reduced to an ever-decreasing minimum.

Now, what happens when an expert stenographer, accustomed to take the letters of lawyers, or, it may be, to report the doings of the legislature (and I have a particular case in mind), tries his hand at a novel, an essay on Buddhism, or any other work that draws extensively upon the imagination ? He has put out in his little boat, leaving the narrow channel of practical affairs, and breasting the waves of a diction that will capsize him unless he happens to be a student, — possibly something of a bookworm, — and hence has at his command a vocabulary in some degree approaching that of the man he is endeavoring to supplement. This point is seldom appreciated by literary workers, and I have been repeatedly called upon for the solution of what seemed to them grotesque and unaccountable lapses in the work of stenographers having a certain prestige and high prices. “ The violins . . . carrying the hearts of the listeners with them in their oval sides,” wrote a stenographer who had an exalted idea of his own merits, when he should have said, “ in their veiled sobs.” To the author no possible analogy was traceable in oval sides and veiled sobs. But deprive both adjectives of their vowels, and they become respectively vl and vld. Now I myself write oval exactly as I do veiled, except that in the latter case I make the outline a little shorter. As for the confusion of sobs with sides, these outlines also are similar, except that one is inclined from left to right, while the other is vertical. It is easy to see that, in the rush of notetaking, a line which ought to be vertical may receive a decided inclination ; and in this instance it is more than likely that when the writer attempted to read his notes he was at a loss to tell whether he had intended an oblique outline or an upright. Any one who supposes that want of skill rather than lack of imagination was at the root of the error is wide of the mark. A hundred years of practice in commercial shorthand would not have given the young man a mental equipment enabling him to fix on veiled sobs rather than oval sides. The latter words had been dictated to him on more than one occasion, but never in his whole business career had he been called upon to write either veiled or sobs. The accuracy with which a stenographer is able to interpret his notes is, therefore, not so much a matter of mechanical skill as is commonly supposed. It depends upon the relation his vocabulary bears to that of his employer; also upon the extent to which he expresses words of one or more syllables by a single stroke ; and finally upon the number of sounds he is accustomed to represent by the same stroke. I recall the puzzled face of a friend who showed me a typewritten communication from a business house, informing him that the letters would be sent to him as soon as he was ready to look at them.

“ I asked for leathers, and leathers must have been the word that was dictated. How could that typewriter have made such an extraordinary blunder ? ”

“ I see nothing extraordinary in it. I too write letters exactly as I do leathers, leaving out the vowels and suppressing the h, a letter that plays a very inconspicuous part in shorthand. But I write letters so much oftener than leathers that, in an unreflecting mood, my first impulse on seeing the outline would be to pronounce it letters. If I chose, I could invent separate outlines for the two words ; but experts have no time for fine distinctions ! ” I responded, as my friend walked away, shaking his head over the incredible unreliability of shorthand.

In longhand, as any one will see on reflection, it takes several strokes to form a single letter. In the small r, for instance, there are a number of upward and downward strokes, any one of which, if carelessly made or turned in the wrong direction, may be disguised or covered up without conscious effort on the part of the writer. It is not so in typewriting, for here every stroke represents an entire letter ; and while this insures a considerable gain in speed, it also renders the consequences of an impulsive movement far more disastrous than in longhand. In shorthand the consequences of an imperfect stroke are still more momentous, for the reason that most words of one syllable and many words of more than one syllable — for example, letter and leather — may be, and commonly are, represented by a single stroke.

Enunciation is a very important factor in dictation. The slipshod enunciation of business men is beyond belief; and it may be that after all, in the case I have just cited, the word leathers was so slurred over at the time of dictation that it sounded like letters. Dictation, no less than note-taking, is, pour ainsi dire, an art requiring study and practice. Some men go through life expecting the stenographer to know their wishes almost by necromancy. A secretary who is a good horse will adapt himself to any situation, but the very best results of all are brought about only when there is a measure of silent mutual accommodation.

Who can doubt that if the typewriter had been taken up by literature before commending itself to merchants, instead of the reverse, the result would have been a larger amount of good work, although at a lower rate of speed ? By far the greater number of authors seek the stenographer because he is a person capable of turning copy into typewriting, and not because they like to see their precious sentences entering the shorthand state and emerging from it like a lame butterfly from an abortive chrysalis.

In a word, the possibilities of stenography are so limited that its use will always be confined to a class of people who, in mental stature, like the slaves that took down the orations of Cicero, can seldom come up to those who dictate to them. But in typewriting this need not be the case. It is now, because typewriting is confined to a limited class; but let the typewriter become as popular as the piano, and the absurdity of entrusting the transcription of important manuscripts to young men and women untrained in their mother tongue will be apparent to every one. Would it be reasonable to engage a man for gardener who knew nothing about plants, trees, pruning, watering, fertilization ? Is it not ill done to employ for the manipulation of words and sentences a person who cannot always be trusted to spell correctly, who knows nothing whatever about punctuation, who cannot make out obscure handwriting, and to whom every foreign phrase, every line of poetry, every other proper name, is a stumblingblock ? What would be my sensations were I obliged to put even this modest article which I am now preparing into the hands of a copyist ? All I know is that, until the agony was over, I should not get a single night’s sleep.

I do not, I trust, underrate the importance of music as a factor in education, yet I look for a time when the piano will be less common than the typewriter, and when the use of the latter will be taught to children as a matter of course, and at an age when it is customary to teach them the alphabet from books. In a well-appointed home two pianos are none too many, and already I have no difficulty in foreseeing a typewriter in every room. It may be that the prejudice against typewritten letters, due in large part to the fact that they are dictated, will by that time have ceased altogether. In existing conditions, a typewritten letter of condolence — and I have seen several — is, to say the least, a breach of courtesy ; but the assertion made a number of years ago in The Galaxy, that no love-letter would ever be written upon the typewriter, is falsified, as I have even known a young man to run the risk of dictating a letter to his fiancée. Now that women are beginning to employ stenographers on their account, the penalty for sending them a typewritten communication is no longer forfeiture of friendship ; and any one who is accustomed to dictate the bulk of his correspondence knows that it is increasingly difficult to draw a hardand-fast line between those occasions when one may address a stranger, a friend, or an acquaintance in typewriting, and those when he may not.

It is an effort for us to put ourselves in the position of a scholarly Italian or Englishman of the time of Elizabeth, who would have scorned to include in his library a single product of the printing-press. The aversion to the printed book was not only perfectly natural, it was founded in reason ; yet it is now thoroughly a thing of the past; and just as the introduction of printing brought about a new condition of things, so it is not altogether unlikely that the development of typewriting will bring about, on a smaller scale, a revolution in the affairs of the coming century. In the first place, there will be a falling-off in the demand for private secretaries. Authors in the physical condition of Sir Walter Scott when he dictated The Bride of Lammermoor, or of Mr. Prescott when he composed his various histories, will of course continue to dictate their contributions to literature. A still more limited number, who find in dictation a positive aid and impetus to composition and self-expression, or who are deterred by natural indolence or pressure of business from setting down all that is in their minds, will do the same. The man of affairs also will continue to depend more or less upon a private secretary, whose place no phonograph or machine of any description can fill. But as soon as the man of genius, who, like Mr. Bryant,

finds out the physical relief of typewriting, he will, as a rule, prefer to arrange his own manuscripts for publication ; and the extent to which he will be able to exercise his taste and judgment in an infinite number of niceties, such as the space covered by the title, the number and sequence of paragraphs, the insertion of footnotes, will fully reward him for the short, sharp struggle it cost him to master the machine.

Men and women who employ secretaries seem to me to have both too much and too little patience with their shortcomings. No one is surprised when even a professional violinist confesses his inability to read a piece of difficult music at sight, and it ought to be borne in mind that not every note-taker can be a Paganini in shorthand. For example, miracles in the rendering of proper names are expected of the stenographer. In my opinion, all proper names, except those that have become perfectly familiar, should be taken down in longhand. I have heard of stenographers who wrote all proper names indiscriminately in shorthand ; but these people must have had phenomenal memories if they were able to recall not only the pronunciation, but the spelling of every unfamiliar name in letters dictated at the rate of half a hundred a day. Unless the person dictating is careful to spell at least three names out of every five, the stenographer must inevitably hesitate between such words as Jessie and Jesse, Orion and O’Ryan, when he arrives at the task of writing out his notes. In general, men of letters and men of business are equally aware of the importance of spelling each name that is at all likely to confuse the stenographer ; but in nine cases out of ten, not realizing the difference between writing a familiar name in shorthand and an unfamiliar one in longhand, they spell so rapidly that only a stenographer of exceptional ingenuity can keep up with them. Accustomed to seeing his secretary dash off such words as Broadway, January, San Francisco, the names of the members of the firm and of their regular correspondents, with only one or two quirks of the pen in each case, the person dictating fails to realize that a name like Durand - Ruel cannot be taken down with equal rapidity when it is spelt out. The truth is that a very long sentence can be set down in shorthand during the time it takes to write out D-u-r-a-n-d-R-u-e-l; and although I know from experience that a secretary is more apt to pique himself on his facility in taking names and addresses than on any other point, still the number of errors in typewritten envelopes is so unnecessarily large that I believe in the long run employers would find it worth their while to spell new names and addresses as deliberately for an expert as for a person incapable of anything but ordinary longhand.

Even in typewriting there are special difficulties, particularly in what is called tabulated work, which it would be well for employers to look into, if they would know what not to expect from their secretaries. It is natural to suppose that because an ordinary article can be run off more rapidly upon the typewriter than with the pen, therefore tabulated work can be more quickly set down on the machine than in any other way. In reality, any tabulated work, unless of the simplest description, is far more easily set down with the pen than on the machine. The arrangement of words, figures, or letters, in groups, in columns, or in series, becomes a matter of the most delicate adjustment; it may even resolve itself into counting the number of ems in each row, and balancing it against the number of ems in another or in all the others. If the writer prefers to rush the work, and contents himself with guessing at the mathematical relations between different parts of the statement, it can hardly fail to look awry, and will make a disagreeable impression upon eyes accustomed to the carefully balanced details of a page of printing. I must not forget to mention a contrivance of recent invention, called the accounting device, which has been added to my own machine, and which enables the writer to pass from one point to another in a piece of tabulated work almost without mental calculation or fear of putting down a character in the wrong place.

Another step in the right direction is the effort to overcome the raggedness of the right-hand margin, a drawback that has made it appear more than doubtful whether typewriting can ever compete with printing in externals. Most of the machines are now fitted with a key, or with some corresponding invention, which gives one or more additional spaces or ems at the end of each line, and on my machine enables the writer to place an entire word in either margin. The device is so simple that in all probability it would have been added long before this had the demand for perfect work been stronger. But the end and aim of the copyist, like that of the English schoolboy in the game of hare and hounds, seems to be to get over the ground at any cost, plunging into swamps that might have been avoided if the way had been more carefully chosen, and strewing the road with the tattered remains of whatever happens to be the manuscript of the moment. In this profitless performance the copyist is not only unduly indulged ; he is encouraged by those who employ him. No doubt the employer’s unfamiliarity with the machine makes it difficult for him to exact better work, or to give the hints and suggestions which, for some reason or other, the business college seems incapable of supplying. Like many American products, even the more expensive typewriters are sometimes so loosely put together, or made of such inferior metal, that they cannot be depended upon to run well for two weeks together without repairs. As in the shoes on our feet and the pavements under them, the element of conscientiousness has been wanting to the workmanship. It is only within a very few years, and perhaps not in more than two or three machines, that it has been possible to obtain a light and uniform action of the keyboard. On most machines (though not on my own helpmeet) my fingers feel as if they were attacking a piano affected by dampness, and requiring different degrees of force for different keys, or for the same key at different times. It is a fortunate thing for modern music that a Liszt or a Paderewski has not been obliged to watch the instrument so closely as I imagine Mozart and his contemporaries must have done, making up for the lack of resonance and responsiveness by long embellishments and other devices and makeshifts. On a tolerably good piano, it is possible to adjust the stroke to the keyboard, to play an approximately even scale, to strike a key with the certainty of getting a response from it. The sluggishness of the average typewriter is such that the copyist can never be certain of the pressure needed for each key ; and as the employer knows too little about the matter to discriminate between the lapses made by the writer and the defects in the work due to the crudeness of the instrument, he good naturedly overlooks deficiencies which a few days of vigorous instruction and a demand for machines of more varied capacity would go a long way toward removing.

Suppose typewriting to have become as universal as piano-playing, and it is easy to see that in his search for a secretary the man of genius will no longer be obliged to content himself with a round peg in a square hole. It may even be that the copyist he engages will know more about typography than he does. Every editor knows that the manuscripts of a celebrity can seldom go into print precisely as written. I have known a few writers whose stories were fullfledged when they were hatched, but they were exceptions. The ideal situation is undoubtedly where the author knows the matter, manner, and melody of a production, his secretary the externals, with the proviso that anything so largely a matter of taste as an author’s style of punctuation demands special study on the part of his amanuensis, and, unless it prove too erratic and inconsistent, should be adopted in those dictations which leave out periods, paragraphs, exclamation points, and quotation marks.

But every luxury brings its own torment, and as hardly any copyist, however ingenious, is an exception to the rule, I am convinced that in future by far the greater number of literary workers will prefer to do their own typewriting, on the principle that, after all, if you really wish a thing well done you had better do it yourself. I remember puzzling, when I had but a tiny wit, for I was but a tiny girl, over a passage in the Pilgrim’s Progress where Faithful is called a scholar because he is able — not without a struggle — to make out an inscription pertaining to lucre in the field of that name. What had that to do, I asked myself, with his being a scholar? A child reared in New England, where there are few people of any color who cannot read, could hardly conceive of a state of society in which men who could make out plain English were considered master hands. I should not be surprised if at no distant day it were possible to acquire a thorough knowledge of typewriting without being a typewriter ; just as it is still possible to own a large library, and to read aloud with a tranquil, flowing, I had almost said andantino movement, yielding, with the minimum of emphasis, to the fluctuations of a sentence or line of poetry (rather than damming them up and turning them on at carefully calculated intervals, like the water-jets at Versailles) without being an elocutionist !

Lacy C. Bull.