You may understand how quickly it is all done when I tell you that my order will probably be at home sooner than I could have carried it from here." "How do you manage in the thinly settled rural districts ?" I asked.
"The system is the same," Edith explained; "the village sample shops are connected by transmitters with the central county warehouse, which may be twenty miles away.

The transmission is so swift, though, that the time lost on the way is trifling.

But, to save expense, in many counties one set of tubes connect several villages with the warehouse, and then there is time lost waiting for one another.

Sometimes it is two or three hours before goods ordered are received.

It was so where I was staying last summer, and I found it quite inconvenient."[1] "There must be many other respects also, no doubt, in which the country stores are inferior to the city stores," I suggested.
"No," Edith answered, "they are otherwise precisely as good.