five minutes' delay in the arrival at the terminus and necessitate an embarrassing interview with the train-master. A trip on a crowded line may involve watching for danger signals every quarter of a mile and the maintenance of such high speed that they must be obeyed the instant they are espied in order to avoid the possibility of collision.*

The passenger runner finds himself now and then with a disabled engine on his hands, and two or three hundred passengers standing around apparently ready to eat him up if he does not remedy the difficulty in short order. Often in such cases he is in doubt himself whether the repairs necessary to enable his engine to proceed will occupy fifteen minutes or an hour. This, with the knotty question of where the nearest relief engine is, causes the brow to knit and the sweat to start, and to the young runner proves an experience which he long remembers.

Stories of fast running are common but unreliable; and when truthful, important considerations are omitted. There are so many elements to be considered that usually the verdict can be justly rendered only after a careful comparison with previous records. Most regular runs include a number of stops, and are subject to numerous slackenings of the speed, thus dimming the lustre of the record of the trip as a whole. Frequently, quick runs which have been reported as noteworthy have had favoring circumstances not told of. An engineer who makes a specially quick trip feels proud of his engine, and of the honor of having been chosen for an important run, and he shares with the passengers the exhilaration produced by such a triumph of science and skill in annihilating space; but in the matter of credit to himself for experience and judgment, patience and forethought, he feels and knows that many a trip in his everyday service is worthy of greater recognition. Many a runner has to urge his engine, day after day, with a load 25 per cent. heavier than it was designed for, over track that is fit only for low speeds, at a rate

* The New York elevated roads run 3,500 trains a day, each one passing signals (likely to indicate danger) every hundred rods, almost. Who can expect engineers never to blunder in such innumerable operations?

VOL. IV.-59

which demands the most constant care. He must run fast enough over the better portions of the track to allow of slackening where prudence demands slackening. The tracks of many roads are rendered so uneven by the action of frost in winter that with an unskilful runner the passengers would be half frightened by the unsteady motion of the cars. This condition is not common on the important trunk lines, of course; but it does prevail on roads that carry a great many passengers, nevertheless; and engineers who guide trains over such difficult journeys, gently luring the passengers, with the aid of the excellent springs under the cars, into the belief that they are riding over a track of uniform smoothness, should not be forgotten in any estimate of the fraternity as a whole.

The engineer whose humanity is not hardened has his feelings harrowed occasionally by pedestrians who risk their lives on the track. Tramps and other careless persons are so numerous that the casual passenger in a locomotive cab generally cannot ride fifty miles without seeing what seems to him a hair-breadth escape, but which is nevertheless treated by the engineer as a commonplace occurrence. These heedless wayfarers do, however, occasionally carry their indifference to danger too far, and they are tossed in the air like feathers. Doubtless there are those who, like the fireman who talked with the tender-hearted young lady, regret the killing of a man chiefly "because it musses up the engine so;" but, taking the fraternity as a whole, warmth of heart and tenderness of feeling may be called not only well-developed but prominent traits of character. The great strike on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy road last spring, which proved to have been illadvised, would have been possible only in a body of men actuated by the most loyal friendship. Undoubtedly a large conservative element in the Brotherhood of Engineers believed the move injudicious, but they joined in it out of

† Mr. Porter King of Springfield, Mass., who has run an and who served on the Mohawk & Hudson, the Long Island and the New Jersey railroads in 1833-44, when horses were the motive power and the reverse lever consisted of a pair of reins, ran until December, 1887, before his engine ever killed a man.

engine on the Boston & Albany road for forty-four years,

The passenger-train conductor has in many respects the most difficult position in the railroad ranks. He should be a first-class freight conductor and a polished gentleman to boot. But in his long apprenticeship on a freight train he has very likely been learning how not to fulfil the additional requirements of a passenger conductorship. In that service he could be uncouth and even boorish and still fill his position tolerably well; now he feels the need of a life-time of tuition in dealing with the diverse phases of human nature met with on a passenger train. He must now manage his train in a sort of automatic way, for he has his mind filled with the care of his passengers and the collection of tickets. He must be good at figures, keeping accounts, and handling money, though the freight-train service

Just Time to Jump.

has given him no experience in this line. Year by year the clerical work connected with the taking up of tickets and collecting of cash fares has been increased until now on many roads an expert bank clerk would be none too proficient for the duties imposed. The conductor who

a Philadelphia lawyer with three heads" to fill his shoes was not far out of the way. Every day, and perhaps a number of times a day, he must collect fares of fifty or a hundred persons in less time than he ought to have for ten. Of that large number a few will generally have a complaint to make or an objection to offer or an impudent assertion concerning a fault of the railroad company which the conductor cannot remedy and is not responsible for. A woman will object to paying half fare for a ten year old girl or to paying full rates for one of fifteen. A person whose income is ten times larger than he deserves will argue twenty minutes to avoid paying ten cents more (in cash) than he would have been charged for a ticket. Passengers with legitimate questions to ask will couch them in vague and backhanded terms, and those with useless ones will take inopportune times to propound them. These are not occasional but every-day experiences. The very best and most intelligent people in the community (excepting those who travel much) are among those who oftenest leave their wits at home, when they take a railroad trip. All these people must be met in a conciliatory manner, but without varying the strict regulations in the least degree. The officers of the revenue department are inexorable masters, and passengers offended by alleged uncivil treatment are likely to make absurd complaints at the superintendent's office. A conductor dreads an investigation of this sort, however unreasonable the passengers' complaints may be, because it may tend to show that he lacked tact in handling the case. But after becoming habituated to this sort of dealings, there are still left the occasional disturbances which no amount of philosophy can make pleasant. These are the encounters with drunken and dis

orderly passengers. The conductor, starting at the forward end of his train, finds, perhaps, in the first car one or two "toughs" who refuse payment of fare and are spoiling for a fight. Care must be taken with this sort of character not to punish him or use the least bit of unnecessary severity, for he will, when sobered off, quite likely be induced by a sharp lawyer to sue the railroad company for damages by assault. The conductor, however, if he be one who has (in his freight train experience) dealt with tramps, is able to cope with his customer and confine him to the baggage car or put him off the train. But a tussle of this kind is, at best, far from soothing to the temper, and the very next car may contain the wife of a millionaire, who will expect the most genteel treatment and critically object to any behavior on the part of the conductor which is not fully up to the highest drawing-room standard. Experiences of this kind, it can be readily imagined, are exceedingly trying. The conductor cannot give himself up completely to learning gentility, for he still has need for his old severity.

The difficulty of always finding the ideal person when wanted has led to the employment of men of good address who have had little or no training on freight trains; so that we find some conductors who are able to deal with all sorts of passengers with a good degree of success, but who are far from brilliant as managers of trains, technically speaking; while others, who from their early experience have first class executive ability, are slow in discarding the somewhat rough habits of the freight train. While there are not wanting those who strive faithfully to reach the ideal, and succeed admirably, it may be said that the average conductor retains more of the severe than of the gentle side of his character, at least so far as outward behavior goes. The rigid requirements of his financial superiors, which compel him to actually fight for his rights with dishonest and stingy passengers, make it almost impossible that he should be otherwise. Ignorant foreigners, poor women and girls who have lost their way, and other unfortunates are, however, encountered often

enough to preclude the conductor's forgetting how to be compassionate.

The heroic element is not wholly lacking in the conductor's life. The temporary guardianship of several hundred people is an important trust even in smooth sailing, but the conductor's possibilities are entirely different from the engineer's. He has so much to do to attend to the petty wants of passengers that their remoter but more important interests are not given much thought. The anxieties of a hundred nervous passengers who terribly dread the loss of an hour by a missed connection are much more likely to weigh down a conductor's mind than any thoughts of his duty to them in a possible emergency that will happen only once in five years. And yet the last mentioned contingency is a real one. Only last March, in the great Eastern blizzard, conductors risked their lives in protecting their passengers. One spent three or four hours in travelling a mile and a half to a telegraph office; in consequence of the six feet of snow, the blinding storm, and the darkness, he had to constantly hug a barbedwire fence to avoid losing his way, and was on the point of exhaustion when he reached the station.

The term "station agent" means, practically, the person in charge of a small or medium sized station. When one of these men is promoted to the charge of a large city station, either freight or passenger, he becomes really a local superintendent, his duties then consisting very largely in the supervision of an army of clerks and laborers, who must, each in his place, be as capable as the agent himself. The agent at a small station has a great multiplicity of duties to perform. He must sell tickets, be a good book-keeper, and a faithful switchtender. He generally must be a telegraph operator and must be vigorous physically. He must be ready, like the conductor, to submit to some abuse from ill-bred customers, and should be the peer of the business men of his town. He often encounters almost as great a variety of knotty problems as the superintendent himself, though he has the advantage that he can generally turn them over to a superior if he feels unequal to them. The practical difficul

ties that most beset him are those incident to doing everything in a hurry. People who buy tickets wait until the train is about to start before presenting themselves at the office. Then the agent has a dozen other things to attend to and must therefore detect counterfeit ten dollar bills with the expertness of a Washington treasury clerk. Just as a train reaches his station the train dispatcher's click is heard on the wires and he must drop everything and receive (for the conductor) a telegram in which an error of a single word would very likely involve the lives of passengers. At a very small station the checking of baggage devolves on the agent, his over-burdened back being thus loaded with one more straw. He is in many cases agent for the express company and so must count, seal, superscribe, and way-bill money packages and handle oyster kegs and barrels of beer at a moment's notice. Women with wagon-loads of loose household effects to go by freight, and shippers of car-loads of cattle, for which a car must be specially fitted up, will appear just as the distracted station-man is receiving a telegram with one side of his brain and selling a ticket with the other. The household goods must be weighed and tagged, the sewing machine tied up, and tables repaired; the cattle shipper must be given a short lecture on the legal bearings of the bargain for transportation which he is about to make, and his demand that his live stock shall be carried 500 miles more quickly than human animals are taken over the same road is to be gently repressed. It is not every day that a small station is enlivened by this sort of excitement, yet it is common, and is familiar to every station agent. The variety in the duties of this position is, however, a great advantage to the ambitious young man because it serves to give him a good lift toward a valuable business education. He can learn about the methods and knacks and tricks of many different kinds of business, and can profit by the knowledge thus gained. Thomas J. Potter, the lately deceased vice-president of the Union Pacific Railway, whose memory it is proposed to perpetuate by a bronze statue, began his railroad career as agent at a small station in Iowa.

Others of equal ability and perfection of character have risen from similar places and by the same means.

The agent at a small station catches his breath between trains. There is then generally ample time for calming the nerves and preparing for the next onslaught. If he is a telegraph operator he can chat with the operators at other stations a common resource if the wires are not occupied with more important affairs. In the class periodicals of operators and railroad men, references to this phase of their life may be constantly seen, and incidents of even romantic interest are not infrequent. Many of the men at small stations are young and unmarried, while at places where the business has increased enough to warrant the employment of an assistant, a young woman to do the telegraphing is frequently the first helper engaged. With this combination it is unnecessary to tell what follows. If iron bars and stone walls are the things which Cupid laughs at, an electric telegraph wire is the thing which makes him "snicker right out," if we may use the language of the circus ring.

At the railroad station next larger in size, the work is more divided. One man sells tickets, another attends to the freight office, another to the baggage, and so on. The ticket-seller must make five-cent bargains with the same urbanity that is given to a $100 trade, and must be able to toss off the latter in two minutes if occasion requires, or to spend an hour in helping the passenger choose the best route among a score of possible ones. The fusilade of questions that must be met by the ticket-seller every time he opens his window is familiar to every one who has ever watched a place of the kind for ten minutes.

The station baggage master has an important but rather thankless place. He must handle 200-pound trunks with as much ease as though they contained feathers, and if he break a moulding off one must meet the reproaches of the owner, who imagines that the time available for handling the trunk was five minutes instead of two seconds. must handle much dirty and otherwise unpleasant stuff, and on the whole pur

He