Lord Mayor's banquet at the Mansion House;
Her Majesty's Opera-house may have burst into
flame after the footlights were extinguished;
Mr. Bright may have been provoked into a
furious attack upon Mr. Disraeli towards the
close of a protracted debate; a block of houses
may have fallen in Tottenham Court-road, as
the inmates were retiring to rest; events like
these of the utmost public interest occur
almost weekly in London, during the season,
and energy must meet the emergencies. It
may safely be predicated that whatever "copy"
is sent to the telegraph office after midnight,
is important. The wires are not kept going for
the mere sake of working them and getting
the money's worth out of them. If the news
after eleven o'clock be of a trivial or
uninteresting character, none is transmitted.

But when the rattle of Hansom wheels is
heard in the street below, or the eager step of
the hurrying messenger is recognised climbing
the stairs, the clerk knows that there is work
to be done, turns up his shirt sleeves, and
prepares for the struggle. He throws himself
into the work with the headlong zeal of the
enthusiast, and "panting time toils after him
in vain." If he be skilful, he wins in the
race of four hundred miles between London
and Glasgow, and succeeds in transmitting
one hundred and twenty words in sixty seconds
—thus beating Father Time by sixty seconds.
Wonderful as this may seem, the feat is even
refined and improved upon when the occasion
demands. Minutes are calculated as covetously
as Pedro Garcias calculated his doubloons.
The correspondent who is burdened
with a late speech, or fire, or heartrending
occurrence, or mysterious scene, or suspicious
circumstance, or brutal assault upon a personage
in high life, sits by the side of the clerk at
the instrument, and scratches the tender, the
harrowing, or the picturesque, according to the
nature of the subject he has in hand. As soon
as he has written one page, containing perhaps
only two sentences, the transmitter seizes it and
commences the despatch. When page number
one reaches its destination, page two is
written, and the process is repeated till the
story is concluded. The correspondent sits
in a room high in the air at Threadneedle-street,
and by the aid of an electrical pen writes
manuscript in Glasgow. The miracle is accomplished
almost simultaneously. The writer in London
is only one page ahead of his confrère in the
capital of the West, and four minutes after
the reporter sitting within a stone's-throw of
the London Exchange has finished, the
transcriber in the Glasgow Exchange has also
ceased from his labours, and the thrilling
account, or graphic description, half a column
long, is partly in type in Glasgow, and
undergoing the process ot hasty correction for the
morning trains. On other occasions when time
is still more pressing, the ready correspondent
will not trouble himself to write, but will
dictate by means of the slave of the wire, in
accents audible and comprehensible as those of
the human voice, to a man, who shut up in a
small room, is burning the midnight oil four
hundred miles away in sleeping Edinburgh.

The chief newspaper proprietors have further
improvements in view. They propose to
establish offices in London, and, now that the
telegraphs are in the hands of the government,
the wire will be led into the metropolitan office,
and also into the printing offices in Scotland.
This will be a great improvement upon the
existing system, and will be much more
convenient. The correspondent in Fleet-street will
then be able to do his Scottish work with as
much comfort and despatch as he would in the
High-street of Edinburgh, writing within hearing
of the click of the type. Greater facilities
will be afforded for sub-editing the matter
collected in the course of the day. At present,
the newspaper attachés are only allowed
entrance to the instrument room, upon sufferance;
no accommodation is provided for them; and
they have not proper opportunities for arranging
and collating their news. The consequence is,
that the wire frequently suffers from plethora:
the reporters and collectors of intelligence
throughout the city having sent in twice as
much as can be transmitted.

The duty of selection and abridgement
devolves upon the sub-editor, who oftentimes toils
at the task from seven in the evening till long
after the midnight chimes which Master Shallow
so often heard. Print, manuscript, and flimsy,
cumber the table before him; and he has to
read through the mass, correct, alter, summarise,
re-write, and boil it down into manageable
and intelligible proportions. Carefully
as this process may be done in London, it
requires to be repeated, with even greater care
ana circumspection, in Glasgow. The telegraph
news is twice sub-edited, and very laborious
the process occasionally is. The matter
looks well, and reads well, in the morning
papers; and the public imagine that the
wire is "fed" at one end, and the manuscript
merely lifted away by the printers at the other.
This is a great error. The news arrives at the
printing ofiice, in a state of what is technically
known as "pie," utterly shaken and broken up,
as it were, by its long journey, and requiring,
in a measure, to be rehabilitated before being
handed to the compositor. It is often mixed
and jumbled, sentences are shattered and
confused, titles dropped out, capital letters
distributed in irregular detachments and the whole
is without arrangement or punctuation. The
matter is sent off in paragraphs from London,
but it arrives in Edinburgh in a consecutive and
seemingly endless string, one subject running
into the other, requiring the closest inspection
to decide where the one ends and the other
begins. The close of the funds, unfeeling
conduct of a Welsh parson, death of a cabinet
minister, brutal outrage by wharfingers,
rumoured resignation of the premier, list of
Lent preachers, flagrant case of cruelty at
Whitechapel, falling in of the Thames Embankment,
daring outrage in the streets, affecting