There is an old Danish ballad which quaintly tells the tale of such old long-distance days, with that blending of humour and pathos that forever goes to the heart of man.  A certain Danish lord had but yesterday taken unto himself a young wife, and on the morrow of his marriage there came to him the summons to war.  Then, as now, there was no arguing with the trumpets of martial duty.  The soldier’s trumpet heeds not the soldier’s tears.  The war was far away and likely to be long.  Months, even years, might go by before that Danish lord would look on the face of his bride again.  So much might happen meanwhile!  A little boy, or a little girl, might be born to the castle, and the father, fighting far away, know nothing of the beautiful news.  And there was no telephone in the castle, and it was five hundred years to the nearest telegraph office.

So the husband and wife agreed upon a facetious signal of their own.  The castle stood upon a ridge of hills which could be seen fifty miles away, and on the ridge the bride promised to build a church.  If the child that was to be born proved to be a boy, the church would be builded with a tower; if a girl, with a steeple.  So the husband went his way, and three years passed, and at length he returned with his pennons and his men-at-arms to his own country.  Scanning the horizon line, he hurried impatiently toward the heliographic ridge.  And lo! when at last it came in sight against the rising sun, there was a new church builded stately there—­with two towers.

So it was with the most important of all news in the Middle Ages; and yet today, as I said, you in New York City have only to knock good-night on your wall, to be heard by your true love in Omaha, and hear her knock back three times the length of France; Pyramus and Thisbe—­with this difference:  that the wall is no longer a barrier, but a sensitive messenger.  It has become, indeed, in the words of Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the wittiest of partitions, and the modern Pyramus may apostrophize it in grateful earnest: 

          “Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall ... 
          Thanks, courteous wall.  Jove shield thee well for this!”

So at least I always feel toward the wall of my apartment every time I call up her whom my soul loveth that dwelleth far away in Massachusetts.  She being a Capulet and I a Montague, it would go hard with us for communication, were it not for this long-distance wall; and any one who knows anything of love knows that the primal need of lovers is communication.  Lovers have so deep a distrust of each other’s love that they need to be assured of it from hour to hour.  To the philosopher it may well seem strange that this certitude should thus be in need of progressive corroboration.  But so it is, and the pampered modern lover may well wonder how his great-grandfather and great-grandmother supported the days, or even kept their love alive, on such famine