wires overhead through the magnificent streets and cities in America.  They spend thousands upon thousands of pounds in beautifying their cities with very fine buildings, and then they disfigure them all by carrying down the pavements the most villainous-looking telegraph posts that ever were constructed.  The practice is carried to such an extent, that down Broadway in New York there are no less than six distinct lines of poles; and through the city of New York there are no less than thirty-two separate and distinct companies carrying all their wires through the streets of the city.  How the authorities have stood it so long I cannot make out.  They object to underground wires—­why, one cannot tell.  It is something like taking a horse to the pond—­you cannot make him drink.  So it is with these telephone companies:  the public of America and the Town Councils have been trying to force the telephone and telegraph companies to put their wires underground, but they are the horses that are led to the pool, and they will not drink.  It is said that the Town Council of Philadelphia have issued most stringent orders that on the first of January next, men with axes and tools are to start out and cut down every pole in the city.  It is all very well to threaten; but my impression is that any member of Town Council or any individual of Philadelphia who attempts to do such a thing will be lynched by the first telephone subscriber he meets.

This practice of running overhead wires has great disadvantages when the wires are used for electric-lighting purposes as well as for ordinary telephone or telegraph purposes.  No doubt the high-tension system can be carried out overhead with economy; but where overhead wires carrying these heavy currents exist in the neighborhood of telephone circuits, there is every possible liability to accident; and in my short trip I came across seven distinct cases of offices being destroyed by fire, of test boxes being utterly ruined, of a whole house being gutted, and of various accidents, all clearly traceable to contacts arising from the falling of overhead wires, charged with high-tension current, upon telegraph and telephone wires below.  The danger is so great and damage so serious that, at Philadelphia, Mr. Plush, the electrician to the Telephone Company, has devised this exceedingly pretty cut-out.  It is a little electro-magnetic cut-out that breaks the telephone circuit whenever a current passes into the circuit equal to or more than an ampere.  The arrangement works with great ease.  It is applied to every telephone circuit simply, to protect the telephone system from electric light wires, that ought never to be allowed anywhere near a telephone circuit.