Artists may come who will portray the marvel of the wires that quiver with electrified words, and the romance of the switchboards that tremble with the secrets of a great city.

Already Puvis de Chavannes, by one of his superb panels in the Boston Library, has admitted the telephone and the telegraph to the world of art.

He has embodied them as two flying figures, poised above the electric wires, and with the following inscription underneath: "By the wondrous agency of electricity, speech dashes through space and swift as lightning bears tidings of good and evil." But these random guesses as to the future of the telephone may fall far short of what the reality will be.

In these dazzling days it is idle to predict.

The inventor has everywhere put the prophet out of business.
Fact has outrun Fancy.