A telegram at a shilling

Text 1: At the telegraph counter, by Arthur Selwood

An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

I was sent to the telegraph office with a message for my father’s agent in Bristol. The clerk counted the words with the end of his pencil and told me that the charge was a shilling for the first twenty and more for every word after. My mother’s message ran to thirty-four words, full of kind inquiries and her regards to the agent’s wife. I had only a shilling and a penny. Standing at the counter, I struck out the greetings, turned ‘arriving on Thursday by the evening train’ into ‘arrive Thursday evening’, and gave the name of the hotel without its street, for the agent knew it well. When the clerk counted again there were nineteen words.

Explain two ways the narrator made the message shorter.