Notes and Comments.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume IV, Issue 226, 8 July 1902, Page 3

Notes and Comments.

The dulcet tones of the telephone girl are to be heard hello, no more. She has oeniral ! to give way to a

mere machine with no capacity for doing anything but its o\%n particular work, no interest in girls' gossip, not fond of carrying on wire flirtations in spare moments and forgetting to ring off till a bona fide customer has sworn so violently that he is ashamed to go to church for a week, and with a stock of patience unrivalled even by Job 1., of revered memory. Waimate people have never had the pleasure of an exchange, and, of course in about half a century when -,ve no get our telephone, the new machine will be universally used. It will likely be replaced by something better, but the present machine will do for us. Each subscriber has a disc something like that of a combination safe, and he revolves this until it clicks off the number he wishes to call for. This causes a switch at "central " to swing into contact with the number noted and the pushing of a button establishes connection. If the line is in use a buzzing noise (instead of the sweet voice saying " engaged ") tells him this fact, and he waits as he would under other circumstances. It is claimed that calls are made with greater rapidity, and as subscribers make their own connections there is no flood of complaints pouring in on days which follovi a girl's " night out." A room bordered with automatic keyboards does all the work. Adieu, sweet girl 'phonist, we never knew you in this littb hamlet —but we had hoped. Just one tear on the grave of your lost billets and our lost hopes. Who has not recognised that wellworn phrase as conthrough veying, without furthe ther words, intimahkakt. tion of the sudden death of the person whose wound was as described. In fact, it had been a law, unalterable as those ot the Medes and Persians, that to make his fate certain the villain of a book or play received the dagger, revolver slug or rapier through his heart, and fell back with acarce a groan. Of late years the advance of science gave him a few minutes more life and he can now Bay a lew words before passing off the earthly stage. But it is with a thrill of astonishment wo read in a staid monthly of a surgeon sewing up wounds in the heart and saving the sufferer's life. The operations are truly described as very wonderful. The chest is opened wide, exposing the lungs—these being pushed to right and left expose the pericardium, a fibrous sac which surrounds the heart, and an incision in this reveals the wondrous organ itself. The surgeon inserts hia finger in the ballet or knife wound and determining its situation and extent closes it with needle and thread. The operation is described as relatively ea«y when the wound is on the exposed side of the heart, but when on the inner side the surgeon takes the heart boldly in his hands, raises it, draws it to him and thus succeeds in accomplishing the suture of the wound and of arresting the hemorrhage. There goes another idol. Boyhood's superstition that a hair swallowed made straight tracks for the heart and stopped it was replaced by the thought that the alleged seat of the tender passions waß so delicate that a foreign substance's touch was death: and this in turn gives way. No more need lovers die of a broken heart; the gaze of science has turned full upon that organ and the mystery hitherto surrounding it is vanishing like the morning mist. ________