A CRAZY TELEPHONE.

Oamaru Mail, Volume IV, Issue 1254, 24 April 1880, Page 2

A CRAZY TELEPHONE.

The telephone occasionally goes crazy. A reporter of the World happening to call recently in a shoe store, between which and its' wholesale manufactory a telephone has been constructed, waa amazed to behold the genial proprietor with face aflame and eyes dilating danoing a hornpipe, while to hia ears he held the speaking tube of the instrument. " What the blank, blank, blank does the idiot mean ?" he exclaimed to the clerks, who imitably clustered around him, One does not always get a chanoe to see a shoe manufacturer dance. Suddenly changing the tube from his ear to his mouth, he shouted out, " Hang your salt fish j I tell you to haye those shoes made to button." An interval of silence. "No, not mutton ; button," he shrieked. More silence, during which the shoe-dealer; kept the instrument to his ear and seemed ta the lookers on to be drawing through it fire and brimstone, so red in the face he grew. Presently, in a rage, he dropped the handles and disappeared into the inner office. The reporter thereupon picked up the ear-trumpets, and was at once saluted with the startling question, "Have you got those fish X sent up packed in ice ?" " Who are you ?" called out the reporter. Who are yow 1" said the voice, <( . How about those shoes?" " A No. 1, 14-3-7 preferred. Take all," said somebody softly, as if murmur* ing to himself among. the pyramids of Egypt- " £low many oaaes have yon sent to the Anphoy Line 1" was the thundering response, "Cases of what—smallpox?" came muttered back dreamily—and then the telephone quivered under a storm of wicked words. " Where are you ?" aaid the reporter. "None of your business," replied the first voice, and there was 3 bang, as if somebody had slammed down the cover of a piano in a hurry, after which, more faintly than before, the same mysterious whispering of mystic numbers went on for a few moments and then ceased. It was all very puzzling until an agent of the telephone company called to explain that the shoe store wire had fallen athwart wires leading respectively to Fulton fish market and the Stock change.