<!doctype tei2 public "-//Library of Congress - Historical Collections (American Memory)//DTD ammem.dtd//EN" [<!entity % images system "005102.ent"> %images;]><tei2>
<teiheader type="text" creator="National Digital Library Program, Library of Congress" status="new" date.created="2003/00/00">
<filedesc>
<titlestmt>
<amid type="aggitemid">lchtml-005102</amid>
<title>Remarkable telegram.  ...: a machine readable transcription.</title>
<amcol>
<amcolname>Lewis Carroll Scrapbook, Library of Congress
</amcolname>
<amcolid type="aggid"></amcolid>
</amcol>
<respstmt>
<resp>Selected and converted.</resp>
<name>American Memory, Library of Congress.
</name>
</respstmt>
</titlestmt>
<publicationstmt><p>Washington, DC, 2003.</p>
<p>Preceding element provides place and date of transcription only.</p>
<p>For more information about this text and this American Memory collection, refer to accompanying matter.</p>
</publicationstmt>
<sourcedesc>
<lccn></lccn>
<sourcecol>Rare Book & Special Collections Division, Library of Congress.</sourcecol>
<copyright>Public Domain</copyright>
</sourcedesc>
</filedesc>
<encodingdesc>
<projectdesc><p>The National Digital Library Program at the Library of Congress makes digitized historical materials available for education and scholarship.</p>
</projectdesc>
<editorialdecl><p>This transcription is intended to have an accuracy rate of 99.95 percent or greater and is not intended to reproduce the appearance of the original work. The accompanying images provide a facsimile of this work and represent the appearance of the original.</p>
</editorialdecl>
<encodingdate>2004/05/18</encodingdate>
<revdate></revdate>
</encodingdesc>
</teiheader>
<text type="publication">
<body>

<div>

<pageinfo>
<controlpgno entity="p0001">0001</controlpgno>
<printpgno></printpgno>
</pageinfo>


<p><hi rend="smallcaps">A Remarkable Telegram</hi>. &mdash; Students of psychology have always attached extreme importance to any manifestation of the working of the human mind under circumstances of great excitement.  As a valuable contribution to this branch of science we would call attention to a remarkable telegram forwarded by the Boston correspondent of the <hi rend="italics">Daily News</hi> on the day of the great fire&mdash;a telegram which was published in London on Monday morning.  The city was in flames; the light of the fire could, as we have since learned, be seen a hundred miles away; and the natural instinct of a correspondent&apos;s mind, uninfluenced by exceptional agitation, would have been to send some information as to the <hi rend="italics">locale</hi> of the fire, the period of its outbreak, the state of the conflagration at the time he sent off his message, and the names of the streets, houses, and business premises destroyed by the flames.  Under ordinary circumstances we have no doubt our contemporary&apos;s representative would have telegraphed this kind of information.  But the fire was obviously fatal to the normal working of the reporter&apos;s intelligence.  Labouring under what we may call conflagration of the brain, the correspondent of the <hi rend="italics">Daily News</hi> sent a long telegram&mdash;without date&mdash;to London, in which he gives a guidebook description of the city quarter of Boston, some valuable reflections on the influence of politics on local affairs, and a pleasing historical notice of the Old South Church.  But with the exception of a statement that this church has been burnt&mdash;a statement which has not been corroborated by later advices&mdash; the correspondent in question vouchsafed no original information whatever.  In fact&mdash;and this is the curious phenomenon to which we will allude&mdash;a newspaper correspondent telegraphing from Boston, under the agitation of intense excitement, transmits exactly the same sort of vague commonplaces that he would naturally have concocted if he had been employed in an office at London, and had had to write something about the fire.  Just as men in momentary terror of death recall a long-forgotten tongue, so this purveyor of news, under the influence of intense cerebral action, telegraphed from Boston the same copy he would naturally have produced in Bouverie-street, London, thus furnishing an odd illustration of the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction.&mdash;<hi rend="italics">Observer</hi>.</p>


</div>

</body>
</text>
</tei2>