Later that day, as we drove from Les Sables d'Olonne, we rode for a long distance alongside the sixty-centimeter line. Its rails were placed inconspicuously in the greensward beside the national highway. It followed that highway for many miles, dipped and rose when the highroad dipped and rose, and when the highway came to a culvert or a narrow bridge the little railroad, without hesitation, curved its way and shared the narrow bridge. At one town we met the train--there was only one upon the line, going up in the morning and back again at night--but it had a stout and immaculate twenty-five-ton locomotive which hauled three or four light passenger-cars and six or seven cars filled with local freight. Do not laugh. I know myself what this idea would be in the United States--a copper wire above the center of the track, separate bridges at the little creeks and rivulets, rock-ballast perhaps, standard-gage, even private right-of-way and _big_ trolley cars--how we Yanks do love the sound of that word "big"!--running every hour up and down the line. Economy? Nonsense. Why speak of the thing? We are rather proud of our interurban trolleys in many parts of this land. But the average interurban stockholder is not very proud of his holdings in them. We have seen the disaster that has come to some of them in New England. Few of them to-day are earning any money; in fact the greater part of them to-day are fighting bankruptcy, despite heavily increased rates and forced operating economies of a sizable nature. Many of these roads should never have been built, particularly where they paralleled existing steam railroads. That was a grave economic mistake for which we are now paying. The lines that led out from the steam roads should have been correlated years ago. That they were not was due generally to a very stupid pride that veiled itself as conservatism. Yet these little French narrow-gage lines, if they have not made "big" money, certainly have not lost. In the years before the coming of the World War they would generally average about 2 per cent. annually upon the investment. But this was not the point. Locally owned and managed they were not built primarily for profit but as a convenience to the communities that they served. Please remember this. In Paris I once found a man who had built many miles of these small railroads.