The next step is to reduce the student's theoretical knowledge to practice, in a department devoted to actual business operations. This business or finishing department is shown at the upper left corner of our front page illustration. The work in this department is as exacting and as real as the work in the best business houses and banks. At the extreme end of the room is a bank in complete operation, as perfect in its functions as any bank in this city or elsewhere. The records made in its books come from the real transactions of dealers who are engaged in different lines of business at their desks and in the offices. The small office adjoining the bank, on the right, is a post office, the only one in the country, perhaps, where true civil service rules are strictly observed. In connection with it is a transportation office. From fifty to a hundred letters daily are received and delivered by the post office, written by or to the students of this department. The correspondence thus indicated goes on not only between the students of this college, but between members of this and other similar institutions in different parts of the country. A perfected system of intercommunication has for years been in practice between co-ordinate schools in New York, Boston, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, and other cities, by which is carried on an elaborate scheme of interchangeable business, little less real in its operations and results than the more tangible and obtrusive activity which the world recognizes as business. The work of the transportation office corresponds with that of the post office in its simulation of reality. The alleged articles handled are represented by packages bearing all the characteristic marks of freight and express packages. They are sent by mail to the transportation company, and by this agency delivered to the proper parties, from whom the charges are collected in due form, and the requisite vouchers passed. Whatever is necessary in the way of manipulation to secure the record on either hand is done, and, so far as the clerical duties are concerned, there is no difference between handling pieces of paper which represent merchandise and handling the real article.