on a grade, the pulling out of the aircouplings automatically sets the brakes on every part, and if you do not know what that means ask one of the old-timers. In the old days of the hand-brakes the very worst of all freight accidents came when a section of a freight train, without any one aboard to set its brakes, broke loose and came crashing down a hill into some helpless train. Ask the old-timer about the hand-couplings and the terrific record of maimed arms and bodies that they left. The modern automatic couplings have been worth far more than their cost to the railroads.

In the course of time and advancement the brakeman leaves the freight and enters the passenger service. Now he is called a trainman, and is attired in natty uniform. He has to shave, to keep his hands clean-wear gloves, perhaps-and be a little more of a Chesterfield. He must announce the stations in fairly intelligible tones, and be prepared to answer pleasantly and accurately the thousand and one foolish questions put to him by pas

sengers.

THE CONDUCTOR

As a conductor he will probably begin in the freight service. His caboose will be a traveling office and more than that, it will carry all the gossip of the division up and down the line. It may be a homely little car, but it is just as sure to be a homelike place. From its elevated outlook he may command a good view of the train away ahead to the engine, and he will be supposed to know all the while that the brakeman are attending to their duties, that the train is in good order, particularly that there are no hot-boxes smoking away and in imminent danger of setting fire to the train and its valuable contents. There is a deal of bookkeeping to be accomplished in that traveling office. The conductor will receive the way-bills of the cars of his train and their contents, and he is held responsible for their safe deliveries to their destination or the junction points where they are to be delivered to other lines.

When he comes to the passenger service there will be still more bookkeeping to confront him, and he will have to be a man

of good mental attainments to handle all the many, many varieties of local and through tickets, mileage-books, passes and other forms of transportation contracts that come to him, to detect the good from the bad, to throw out the counterfeits that are constantly being offered to him. He will have to carry quite a money account for cash affairs, and he knows that mistakes will have to be paid for out of his own pocket.

All that is only a phase of his business. He is responsible for the care and safe conduct of his train, equally responsible in this last respect with the engineer. He also receives and signs for the train orders, and he is required to keep in mind every detail of the train's progress over the line. He will have his own assortment of questions to answer at every stage of the journey, and he will be expected to maintain the discipline of the railroad upon its trains. That may mean in the one instance the ejectment of a passenger who refuses to pay his fare-and still he must not involve the road in any big damage. suit or in another, the subjugation of some gang of drunken loafers. The real wonder of it is that so many conductors come as near as they do to the Chesterfieldian standards.

OTHER MEN OF THE PASSENGER CREW

In the forward part of the train are still other members of its crew, some of them possibly who are not paid by the railroad, but who are indirectly of its service. Among these last may be classed the mailclerks, who are distinctly employes of the Federal Government, and the messengers of the various express companies. If the road be small and the train unimportant these workers may be grouped with the baggagemen in the baggage car. If the train be still less important the baggageman may assume part of the functions of mail-clerk and express messenger. If so, he is apt to have his own hands full. The mere manual exercise of stacking a sixtyfoot baggage car from floor to ceiling with heavy trunks-and the commercial travelers and theatrical folk do carry heavy trunks is no slight matter. But that is not all. The trunk put off at the wrong place or the trunk that is not put off at all

is apt to make the railroad an enemy for life, and the baggageman is another one of the many in the service who is permitted to make no mistakes.

When he has United States mail sacks and a stack of express packages to handle his troubles only multiply. His bookkeeping increases prodigiously and his temper undergoes a sharper strain. Give him all of these, then a couple of fighting Boston terriers, who must, because of one of the many minor regulations of railroad passenger traffic, ride in the baggage car, a cold and draughty car, and you will no longer wonder why the baggageman has a streak of ill-temper at times. His life is certainly no sinecure, neither is he in the direct path of advancement like his co-workers, the fireman and the brakeman.

These train workers who are so little seen by the traveling public-baggagemen, mail clerks and express messengers alike-ride in the most hazardous part of the equipment, the extreme forward cars of the train. Read the list of train accidents, involving loss of life, and in nine cases out of ten, you will find that these have headed the list of killed or injured. Their work is hard, their hours long, their pay modest. They form a silent brigade of the industrial army that is always close to the firing line.

be a junction tower or a point where two busy lines of track intersect or cross one another, it is his duty to set the proper switches and their governing signals.

It seems a simple enough thing, and it is. But even the simple things in railroading must be executed with extreme care. If the tower-man set those switches and sig

SERVICE IN THE RAILROAD OUTPOSTS

There remains in the operating service a great branch of the army that does not scurry up and down the line. Some of these are its lonely outposts, a forlorn tower hidden at the edge of the forest or set out upon the plain, where a desolate man guards a cluster of switch levers and hardly knows of the outer world, save through the clicking of his telegraph key or the rush of the trains passing below his perch. He knows each of these. If his

Photograph by D. F. Urquhart, Jr.

set out upon the plain.

nals three hundred and nineteen times in the course of a day they must be set absolutely correct three hundred and nineteen times. There can be no slurring in his work.

These men in the towers have their own records of bravery. They are the sentinels of the railroad, and faithful sentinels they are each of them. The lonely tower, like so many other phases of railroad activity, gives long opportunity for thought and meditation, and so it is not so strange, after all, that one of them has recently

given the country a most distinguished essayist upon national railroad conditions.

There are even humbler positions in the operating service, each of them demanding a fine loyalty, and a fair measure of ability. Even the young boy who draws a baggage truck knows that the path of advancement starts at his very feet, and the humble track-walker feels that a good part of the railroad safety and the railroad responsibility rests upon his broad shoulders. His is also a forlorn task, trudging back and forth over a section of line, hammer and wrench in hand, looking for the broken rail or other defect, slight in itself, but capable of infinite harm.

By day his task is dreary and arduous enough. By night it is far more so. With his lantern in hand he must patrol the line faithfully, even if the wind howl about him and the snow come to block his progress. The passengers in the fast express trains that whirl past him and who see, if they see anything at all without, only a blotch of a tiny spark of light, do not know that it is a part of their protection. There is a deal of "behind the scenes" in railroad operation.

And so it goes-there are hundreds of hand-switchmen who make the safe path for the train and upon each of them hangs responsibility. It is trite to say that each of them knows that, and that each lives up to the full measure of his responsibility.

THE STATION AGENT

The station agent, even in the smallest towns, has a less lonely time. He comes in contact with the outside world and ofttimes his life goes quite to the other extreme. A local train may be due within three minutes and here comes Aunt Mary Clark, delayed until the train is already whistling the station stop. Aunt Mary is deaf, and it takes her some time to buy her ticket and to ask endless questions which must bring a string of endless answers. At that very moment the agent's telegraph sounder begins to call him. A message, upon which the safety of the operation of that train perhaps depends, is being poured into his ear, and he cannot afford to miss a single click of that instrument, the responsibility will be his if anything goes wrong in its delivery. On

top of all this some commercial traveler may be clamoring for the checking of his trunk the representative of the railroad in the small town has to keep his wits about him in such times.

Of course, if the town be sizable he may have a staff about him. In such a case he may have a baggage-room with a baggageman and baggage-handlers installed; he may have assistants to mind the telegraph instrument and to sell tickets, other assistants to look after the freight. He may even attain to the dignity of a stationmaster in uniform, or else have such a dignitary reporting to him..

But in the majority of railroad stations throughout the United States the station. agent is the staff. Indeed, he is lucky if he has a man to "spell" him in his "off" hours. He probably is the agent of the express company in addition, and probably the agent of the telegraph company, too, which, by arrangement with the railroad, transacts a general commercial business over its wires. Not infrequently the local post office is at the depot, and the agent proves the versatility of his profession by acting as postmaster, too. He serves many masters, as you can see, and not all of these are outside of the railroad. He is not only answerable to the superintendent. In almost every case he is freight agent, too, making out the bills of lading and figuring the complicated rate sheet. For this part of his work he is under the control of the general freight agent. The general passenger agent is also his superior officer. To him he must account accurately for his ticket sales, and that is not always a very easy matter. The question of passenger rates is a fairly complicated one.

Still the agent must not only be able to figure the rate to South Paris, Me., or to Oshkosh, Wis., within two minutes, but he must make out a long and correct ticket within that time, while the railroad's patron demands information about some branch-line connection on another system a thousand miles away. That country station agent earns every cent of his humble salary. He works long hours and then occasionally one of the railroad's traveling representatives will drop in upon him and casually suggest that in his leisure. time he might get out and solicit a little business for the company!

JIGH up in the Cascade range, winding its way through vast regiments of stately firs, was a little mountain stream. Clear and cold it hurried along over the smooth

brown pebbles, pausing now and then in a gently circling eddy before breaking into. the pool below. To all appearances, it was just the same as hundreds of similar little streams, yet it had one great distinction.

Day

For on one of its smooth running ripples was the birthplace of Silverscales. after day a dainty, pink-tinted ball, hardly larger than a pea, was gently rolled to and fro on its pebbly bed. Yet it never rolled far from its resting place. You see, this little pink ball was a salmon egg, and the mother fish, before depositing it, with many others, was careful to select just the right sort of water. With many scoops of her strong, broad tail she had scoured and deepened the nest, so the eggs might rest undisturbed.

Finally, after many days of waiting, the little ball began to assume signs of life. First two little eyes appeared, just under the outer covering. Then, after much effort, the tail broke through, like a tiny bit of polished steel. And how that tail did wiggle! It was never still, and for a time the partly hatched youngster fussed around in a most aimless fashion. Then slowly the head emerged from its hiding place and little Silverscales had his first glimpse of the world. And a queer little object he was, looking for all the world like a currant with a pin stuck through it.

The egg sack, which had sheltered him so long, was still firmly attached to his body, and from it he drew his food supply. Day after day, as he grew larger and

nger, the food sack diminished in size,

until at last it disappeared entirely, and Silverscales, now weaned, was obliged to forage for all his food. And he very soon learned the lesson which all wild creatures must know-to be always on the watch for enemies. One morning, as he lay sunning himself in the shallows, a crafty old crawfish stole up behind him and came near, oh, so very near, getting him fast in his cruel claws. He was so close that he felt the rough teeth scrape his back, and it made his little body tremble with fright. On another occasion, he and some of his more venturesome brothers made a little excursion into deep water. They had proceeded but a little way when a big, hungry trout spied them, and then such a scattering! Silverscales saw two of his dearest friends lost in the mouth of that awful monster, and thereafter the sunlit shallows were good enough for him.

All this time he was eating and growing, getting stronger and more active every day. And when he had attained the respectable length of three inches, it was only to find that he had more enemies. The ever hungry kingfisher looked with favor on him now, and several times he was the object of a swift, dashing plunge. But luck was with him each time, and he would always dart beneath a friendly stone just in the nick of time. The mink and otter, too, prowling stealthily among the rocks, were always glad to make a meal of baby salmon. So his early days in the mountain stream were ones of constant watchfulness.

Then one day the wandering spirit took hold of him, and be became filled with an intense desire to travel down the stream. The familiar pools which had been his home were left behind. The little stream soon merged into a much larger one, and in this new water Silverscales continually ran the gantlet of large hungry trout.