VOLUME VIII.

Acquirements of Amanuenses.

By KENDRICK C. HILL, 117 Duane Street, New York.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE TRIPLE ART OF PHONOGRAPHY-
STENOGRAPHY.

Part г. The Ear in Shorthand.
Part 2. The Hand in Shorthand.
Part 3. The Eye in Shorthand.

(PART 3.)

The light of love, the purity of grace,
The mind, the music breathing from her face,
The heart whose softness harmonized the whole-
And oh, that eye was in itself a soul !—BYRON.
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts.-Milton.
In my mind's eye, Horatio.- Hamlet.

The EYES of a man are of no use without the observing power.-Hood.

The hearing ear and the seeing eye.-Proverbs.

Macbeth.-Avaunt! and quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee!

Thy bones are marrowlcss, thy blood is cold:
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with.

E

IGHTEEN times before the footlights, in the greatest roles of his répertoiré, I saw the immortal and

inimitable Edwin Boothheard that voice, "like the sound of many waters"-felt the touch, mightily, of his majestic, magnetic and marvelous presence. Scores, aye hundreds, of time I saw him climb the loftiest heights of dramatic crises, figuratively electrifying as high as a "$7,000 house "-each word a mental shock of 10,000 volts-with no more visible effort on his part than is observed in the breathing of a sleeping child. The above citation from the "ghost scene" in Shakespeare's Macbeth is such a marked instance. I deduce from it the lesson that without reason in our eyes we are but ghosts with

NUMBER I.

The Bible sums up the life of the great Lawgiver of Israel in this significant sentence, which is a commentary in itself upon the eye :

And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.

The people of Shorthandom may point with pride to here and there a Moses-like leader, with undimmed eye and unabated force-symbols of success and victory. May 31st, I talked by the way and sat at meat with one of them-Mr. Theo. C. Rose, who visited me the day before his departure, with Mr. A. P. Little, for a summer's sojourn in Europe.

Few there are, indeed, in any vocation, of whom half so much may be said as of Moses, viz: At sixty years of age his eye was not half-dim, nor his force half-abated.

Furthermore, without reference to any age in life, sadly we say that of office stenographers generally we fear the poet Thomson penned that pointed line :

"Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye."

Day-dreaming and half-shut eyes are common characteristics of indifferent individual, and with this class of stenographers, though the ear may have heard well and the hand may have written well, under the inspiration of earnest and eloquent representatives in the forum of commerce and trade, the atmosphere of dreamland seems to pervade the region of the typewriter, and they drop into a doze as through their half-shut eyes they dreamily decipher, by slow and sometimes sure degrees, the stenographic notes they so successfully created but a few moments before, and, as the poet Pope put it : See through all things with their half-shut eyes.