Now it was obvious that behind the apparently simple exterior aspects of
any telephone system there must be an intricate and marvelous secret
organization. In Europe my curiosity would probably never have been
excited by the thought of that organization--at home one accepts
everything as of course!--but, in the United States, partly because the
telephone is so much more wonderful and terrible there, and partly
because in a foreign land one is apt to have strange caprices, I allowed
myself to become the prey of a desire to see the arcanum concealed at
the other end of all the wires; and thus, one day, under the high
protection of a demigod of the electrical world, I paid a visit to a
telephone-exchange in New York, and saw therein what nine hundred and
ninety-nine out of every thousand of the most ardent telephone-users
seldom think about and will never see.

A murmuring sound, as of an infinity of scholars in a prim school
conning their lessons, and a long row of young women seated in a dim
radiance on a long row of precisely similar stools, before a long
apparatus of holes and pegs and pieces of elastic cord, all extremely
intent: that was the first broad impression. One saw at once that none
of these young women had a single moment to spare; they were all
involved in the tremendous machine, part of it, keeping pace with it and
in it, and not daring to take their eyes off it for an instant, lest
they should sin against it. What they were droning about it was
impossible to guess; for if one stationed oneself close to any
particular rapt young woman, she seemed to utter no sound, but simply
and without ceasing to peg and unpeg holes at random among the thousands
of holes before her, apparently in obedience to the signaling of faint,
tiny lights that in thousands continually expired and were rekindled.
(It was so that these tiny lights should be distinguishable that the