For a time in Chicago, between my eighteenth and nineteenth years, I was employed as a car-tracer in one of the great freight terminals of a railroad entering Chicago, a huge, windy, forsaken realm far out on the great prairie west of the city and harboring literally a thousand or more cars. And into it and from it would move such long freight trains, heavy with snow occasionally, or drenched with rain, and presenting such a variety of things in cars: coal, iron, cattle, beef, which would here be separated and entangled with or disentangled from many others and then moved on again in the form of other long trains. The clanging engine bells, the puffing stacks, the arresting, colorful brakemen and trainmen in their caps, short, thick coats, dirty gloves, and with their indispensable lanterns over their arms. In December and January, when the days were short and the nights fell early, I found myself with long lists of car numbers, covering cars in transit and concerning which or their contents owners or shippers were no doubt anxious, hurrying here and there, now up and down long tracks, or under or between the somber cars that lined them, studying by the aid of my lantern the tags and car numbers, seeing if the original labels or addresses were still intact, whether the seals had remained unbroken, on what track the car was, and about where, and checking these various items on the slip given me, and, all being correct, writing O. K. across the face of it all. Betimes I would find a consigned car already in place on some far sidetrack, the consignee having already been notified, and some lone worker with a wagon busily removing the contents. Sometimes, being in doubt, I would demand to see the authorization, and then report. But except for occasional cars, that however accurately billed never seemed to appear, no other thing went wrong.