Now I am stripping myself of one of the private comforts of my life, (but what will one not do for mankind?) when I explain that this simple alphabet need not be confined to electrical signals. _Long_ and _short_ make it all,--and wherever long and short can be combined, be it in marks, sounds, sneezes, fainting-fits, canes, or children, ideas can be conveyed by this arrangement of the long and short together. Only last night I was talking scandal with Mrs. Wilberforce at a summer party at the Hammersmiths. To my amazement, my wife, who scarcely can play "The Fisher's Hornpipe," interrupted us by asking Mrs. Wilberforce if she could give her the idea of an air in "The Butcher of Turin."
Mrs. Wilberforce had never heard that opera,--indeed, had never heard of it. My angel-wife was surprised,--stood thrumming at the piano,--wondered she could not catch this very odd bit of discordant accord at all,--but checked herself in her effort, as soon as I observed that her long notes and short notes, in their tum-tee, tee,--tee-tee, tee-tum tum, meant, "He's her brother." The conversation on her side turned from "The Butcher of Turin," and I had just time, on the hint thus given me by Mrs. I., to pass a grateful eulogium on the distinguished statesman whom Mrs. Wilberforce, with all a sister's care, had rocked in his baby-cradle,--whom, but for my wife's long and short notes, I should have clumsily abused among the other statesmen of the day.
You will see, in an instant, awakening Reader, that it is not the business simply of "operators" in telegraphic dens to know this Morse alphabet, but your business, and that of every man and woman. If our school-committees understood the times, it would be taught, even before phonography or physiology, at school. I believe both these sciences now precede the old English alphabet.