At the railroad station next larger in size, the work is more divided. One man sells tickets, another attends to the freight office, another to the baggage, and so on. The ticket-seller must make five-cent bargains with the same urbanity that is given to a $100 trade, and must be able to toss off the latter in two minutes if occasion requires, or to spend an hour in helping the passenger choose the best route among a score of possible ones. The fusillade of questions that must be met by the ticket-seller every time he opens his window is familiar to everyone who has ever watched a place of the kind for ten minutes. The inexperienced traveller wants to be fully posted as to the exact hour of departure of a tri-weekly stage with which he is to connect at a railroad station a thousand miles away, and the more intelligent ones demand an oral time-table covering the trains for the ensuing week on all railroads within a radius of 50 miles. Those who cannot read or understand the time-tables are too modest to ask aid, and their misfortune is disclosed only after their train has gone and they are found in tears; while those who can read the table ignore it and ask questions simply to be sociable. * * * * * [Illustration: The Trials of a Baggage-master.] [Illustration: Station Gardening.] The station baggage-master has an important but rather thankless place. He must handle 200-pound trunks with as much ease as though they contained feathers, and, if he break a moulding off one, must meet the reproaches of the owner, who imagines that the time available for handling the trunk was five minutes instead of two seconds. He must handle much dirty and otherwise unpleasant stuff, and on the whole pursue a very unpoetic life. He has little to do with train-handling, but he "keeps in with" the trainmen and furnishes them with a share of their entertainment. They lounge in his room sometimes and he keeps on tap a supply of jokes such as that about the new brakeman who sent to headquarters for a supply of red oil for his red lantern, and the engineer who lost time with an excursion train on the Fourth of July because the extremely hot weather had elongated the rails and thus materially increased the distance to be travelled over. When "hot boxes" (friction-heated axles) are given as the cause of a delay the real cause of which is concealed (by the conductor who is ashamed of it), the baggage-master gently punctures the deception by suggesting that perhaps a hot _fire_-box (in the engine) is what is meant. Whether the roguish clerk of an inexperienced general manager, who slyly induced his chief to issue an order to station agents directing that "all freight cars standing for any length of time on side tracks must be occasionally moved a short distance in order to prevent flattening of the wheels," had formerly been a baggage-master, history does not state. [Illustration: In the Yard at Night.]