They were referring of course to the brilliant young president of the Southern railway, who was the chairman of the Railroad War Board, constituted, you will remember, as a war measure by the railroads themselves. In that job, and against no small odds, Harrison had won a fair measure of success. He felt keenly the slap at him in the McAdoo selections; he felt another when he was virtually deposed from the control of the railroad which had been his great pride and ambition, and young Mr. Markham brought down from Chicago to be the McAdoo generalissimo of all the roads in the southeastern corner of the land at Atlanta. Yet that last thrust was hardly greater than the first, when the ranking heads of the two railroads which had been the hottest enemies of the Southern in that which it regarded peculiarly as its own territory were lifted to eminence, while the president of the Southern was permitted to retire to Richmond as merely its corporate head, without one atom of authority over the operation of his road. Those who know Fairfax Harrison know how these two blows must have cut. He is a man of intense pride as well as patriotism, a railroader who almost plays the lone hand but plays it very well indeed. A gentleman to the core, born of the gentlest of Virginia blood and lineage--his father private secretary to Jefferson Davis, his mother a gifted American novelist, his brother one-time governor-general of the Philippines--his pride in his family has for years past been exceeded by his pride in the railroad which, as a logical successor to the late Samuel Spencer, he had been upbuilding. Fairfax Harrison himself is a _literateur_ of no small merit. He has made translations of the classics, while to him has long been ascribed the composition of an essay in Latin on the proper carving of Virginia ham. Yet I dare say that in none of his literary excursions has he ever reached greater charm than in the booklet which he wrote eight or nine years ago on the tragic sacrifices made by the men of the Southern who strove to keep their road open and in operation during the terrific floods of 1913. Yet Harrison was not the only man to be reduced menially as well as physically by the director-general of railroads. Carl R. Gray, himself one of the most lovable men in the business, was then president of the Western Maryland. He came to it from a high office with the 'Frisco. That railroad, originally a small local affair largely financed by the city of Baltimore and for many years terminating at Hagerstown in the Cumberland valley, had been built, largely by Rockefeller capital, through to Cumberland and Connellsville (by connection to Pittsburg), paralleling the main stem of the Baltimore and Ohio for virtually the entire distance. It was a real thorn in the side of the B. & O. Mr Gray was quickly elevated to a high post in the Railroad Administration. This was a distinct thrust at Daniel Willard.