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 NOTES OF RECENT CASES

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to that extent the decree would be incapable of same; that the legislature in creating the penalty complete enforcement. It cited Overseers of the had in mind the receiving of dispatches, either Poor v. Overseers of the Poor, 1 Vt. 464, relating written or printed, and that whatever the agent to the removal of paupers, and Overseers v. did or omitted to do with reference to writing Overseers, 87 Pa. 294; Overseers v. Overseers, 9 down the message orally given him, he did as Atl. 457, 22 Cyc. 1217; State v. Pritchett, 106 agent of the sender. The court, in its discus N. C. 667, 11 S. E. 357, and held the statute sion of the question of the agency of the com invalid as being incapable of judicial enforcement. pany's employees, referred to the well-known TELEGRAPHS AND TELEPHONES. (Agency.) cases of first impression in the state of Texas, Ind. — In Western Union Telegraph Company v. Western Union Tel. Co. v. Edsall, 63 Tex. 668; Sanders, 79 N. E. Rep., 406, it is held that the Same v. Foster, 64 Tex. 220, 53 Am. Rep. 754; Gulf, etc., R. R. Co. v. Geer, 5 Tex. Civ. App. penalty for failure to transmit a telegram is recov erable, though the message was delivered orally 349, 24 S. W. 86, holding that an operator, in to and taken down in writing by the company's writing a message for the sender, becomes the agent outside its office, where it appeared that he agent of the sender. The court admitted that the statute seemed to contemplate the filing of filed a message in the office. It was contended by the company that the dispatches at the company's office, or with an statute under which the action to recover the agent while on duty, but concluded that, if it penalty was brought, contemplated the filing of was conceded that the operator was the agent of the sender in writing the message, and until messages in the office, and that a verbal com munication could not bind the company, unless the message was actually in the office of the by recognized custom held out to the world that company, yet when it was filed in the company's whenever any of its employees, whether at the office by its agent, and in the line of his duty, he post of duty or elsewhere, accepted a message, it ceased to be the agent of the sender and became would undertake under penalty to transmit the the agent of the company.