"When I used to be away on long stretches," he said, "with nothing to do but think, I saw how foolish it was giving my money to a saloon keeper for him to put in the bank instead of putting it there myself. It used to come to me at night, as the engine ran along through the shadows, that the friends I had down in the city were not good for much, and that, if I lost my job or was hurt in an accident, they would be the first to turn their backs on me. At last I decided to get away from all my bad associations and from New York too; so I scraped together what money I could and bought this land, where I have lived ever since with my wife and children. That was the best day's work I ever did. It was a hard-looking place when I bought it, nothing but rocks and weeds, but I was proud of it, and put in all my spare time fixing it up until I have made it what it is to-day." As he spoke the engineer's eyes wandered complacently over the gardens, the trim gravel walks, and the pretty house--everything as neat and spic-span as the kitchen of a Dutch house-wife. When not busy with his garden Buchanan's favorite occupation is reading histories of the war and reminiscences of its great generals. He will sit in his rocking-chair on the shady piazza for hours, reading of Lincoln and McClellan and the stirring scenes in which he himself took part--the battles of Second Bull Run, Seven Days, Big Bethel, and Bristol Station. He has fought these battles over again hundreds of times in his fancy, and many a lonely hour on the track has been brightened by the memories of what he saw and did in the great struggle. His admiration for General McClellan knows no bound, and he entered into quite an argument to show that "McClellan did all the work, sir, and the other fellows got all the glory." The only vacation Buchanan has taken in a quarter of a century was a few years ago, when he went South for a month to see the old battlefields once more; but they were all changed, and he came back saddened. "I shall never lay off again," he said, "until I lay off for good." Archie Buchanan is but a fair type of the loyal fellows who drive the flying engines of to-day. Many of them are as thrifty as he is; he told me of one veteran in the company's employ, Thomas Dormatty, who has property in Schenectady valued at one hundred thousand dollars, and who, in spite of his seventy years, does his regular run between Albany and Syracuse. It is easy to see what that means of saving and prudent investment, when one remembers that the best engineers receive only from one hundred and forty to one hundred and sixty dollars per month. And when they have finished their terms of usefulness, and are unable to run any longer, that same day their pay stops, as it stops when they are ill; for railway companies are not philanthropists and have no pension system.