FOR LAST WORDS
THE special kind of telephone designed to be affixed to the bedside of one who may have the bad luck to suffer from some infectious or contagious disease is a thoughtful provision for a crying need. By means of the instrument so placed, the patient’s friends are able to converse to him, read and sing at him, and, in general, give him the benefit of their society without danger of getting back more than they bestow. The plan is of admirable simplicity and nothing could be better—for the friends. There must be a certain satisfaction in possessing one end of a telephone at the other end of which there is one who cannot get away—one who has to listen to as many helloes as may be thought good for him, and to submit to the question, “Is that you?” when you know that it is he, as frequently as you choose to afflict him with it. That he is heartily wishing but impotently unable to transmit his disorder through the wire adds something to the joy of the situation.
One of the advantages of the sick-bed telephone lies in the fact that it can be used for preservation of “last words.” Hitherto those only of men who died surrounded by attentive friends have had a chance of getting before the public; those of the unfortunate infectionary, isolated from his race and dying in a pesthouse, assisted by hireling physicians and unsympathetic nurses, have been lost to the world. No matter how many years of his life the patient may have been engaged in their composition and rehearsal; no matter how “neat and opprobrious” they were, they fell upon unappreciative ears, and were not recorded. Under the newrégimethe patient as his fire fails may summon his friends to the telephone, launch at them his Parthian platitude and die in the pleasant consciousness that posterity will have profit of his death. Whether, like Falstaff, he choose to give his remarks a reminiscent character and “babble o’ green fields;” confine himself to the historical method, like Daniel Webster with his memorable “I still live;” assume the benevolent pose, and, like Charles II, urge the survivors not to let some “poor Nelly” starve; the exclamatory, like the late President Garfield, who, according to one Swaim, said “OSwaim!” and let it go at that; or the merely idiotic, like the great Napoleon with his “Tête d’armée,” the faithful telephone will be there, ready and willing to transmit (and transmute) the sentiment, admonition, statement or whatever it may be.
To persons intending to make this use of the telephone a word of counsel may not be impertinent. As no human being, however well-eared, ever understood the telephone until it had repeated itself a number of times in response to his demands for more light, and as the moribund are not commonly in very good voice, it will be wise to begin the “last words” while there is yet a little reserve fund of life and strength remaining, for repetition and explanation.