Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE TELEPHONE DIRECTORY By Berton Braley What is there seeming duller than this book, This stolid volume of prosaic print? And yet it is a glass through which we look On wonderland and marvels without stint. It is a key which will unlock the gate Of distance and of time and circumstance, A wand that makes the wires articulate With hum of trade and whisper of romance! Somewhere there is enchantment in each page— The whirr of wheels, the murmurs of the mart, The myriad mighty voices of the age, The throbbing of the great world's restless heart,— Such are the sounds this volume seems to store For him who feels the magic of its thrall, Who views the vistas it unrolls before His eyes that scarce can comprehend them all! Here is the guide to all the vast extent The wires have bound together, this will show The way to help when need is imminent, When terror threatens or when life burns low; This brings the lover to his heart's desire, That he may speak to her o'er hill and lea, This is the secret of the singing wire, To all the " world without " this is the key! From Songs of a Workaday World, by Berton Braley. Copyright, 1915, George H. Doran Company, Publishers. SO SPARKS OF THE WIRELESS By Walter Sanders Hiatt The youths of the world are running away to sea again. But yesterday the sea had lost its romance, had become a place of prosaic traveling from an icy port to a hot one, with the tying up at the coal-blackened dock the most fanciful adventure of the voyage. The pirates, alas! had gone to work. There was naught left of the wondrous days of old but the yarns found in the pages of " The Pilot," " Peter Simple," " Treasure Island." The American lad had quit the sea these thirty years. It had hardly kept a place in...