Not long ago I rode from Kane to Mount Jewett, twelve miles across the hills of that same northwestern corner of Pennsylvania. I wanted to catch the northbound flyer of the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburg railroad out of the latter town. Between Kane and Mount Jewett there stretches a rather remote branch of one of America's largest and best operated railroads. It was in the dead of winter and I should have preferred to ride upon a railroad train. But one train a day and missing the important connections gave me no opportunity whatsoever. I was forced to ride in a motor-bus upon a slippery ice-coated highway. Twenty-three other persons, the most of them also trying to catch the northbound flyer of the B. R. & P., were doing the same thing. The bus made four trips a day in each direction and the driver said that it was not only good business but steady. He charged seventy-five cents for the ride in each direction, which was something more than six cents a mile. A good many people complain at paying more than 3.6 cents a mile upon the rail, but they are not usually short-haul riders. Here was a steam railroad losing its traffic by default. Obviously it might not be able to put a steam train on that little run--in all probability a worn-out engine with two worn-out and dirty cars--and make a successful opposition to the motor-bus, but I think that with its own well-planned motor-unit operated on frequent headway and in connection with the trains at its terminals it would regain for the railroad a large portion of the lost traffic. Unfortunately, as I have said, this was a remote branch line. Yet the president of the railroad of which it is a branch has much pride in the thought that he loses nothing in the efficiency of the operation of his property because it is merely widespread. He honestly and sincerely is trying to build up its service, to repair the inroads made into it during the period of Federal administration. He has done wonders in a few short months. But, largely because he is but a man and not a super-man, he cannot know everything about his remote branches of this sort. He cannot even build up an organization that will know it. No president of a 4,000-mile railroad ever can. Which is one of the large evils to be charged forever against the absentee landlordism method of operating our railroads.