“Where I grunt, you’d lie down, Poney: but, as I was saying, I don’t blow much. Notwithstandin’, _if_ you want to see freight that is freight moved lively, you should see me warbling through the Alleghanies with thirty-seven ore-cars behind me, and my brakemen fightin’ tramps so’s they can’t attend to my tooter. I have to do all the holdin’ back then, and, though I say it, I’ve never had a load get away from me yet. _No_, sir. Haulin’s’s one thing, but judgment and discretion’s another. You want judgment in my business.” “Ah! But—but are you not paralysed by a sense of your overwhelming responsibilities?” said a curious, husky voice from a corner. “Who’s that?” ･007 whispered to the Jersey commuter. “Compound—experiment—N.G. She’s bin switchin’ in the B. & A. yards for six months, when she wasn’t in the shops. She’s economical (_I_ call it mean) in her coal, but she takes it out in repairs. Ahem! I presume you found Boston somewhat isolated, madam, after your New York season?” “I am never so well occupied as when I am alone.” The Compound seemed to be talking from half-way up her smoke-stack. “Sure,” said the irreverent Poney, under his breath. “They don’t hanker after her any in the yard.” “But, with my constitution and temperament—my work lies in Boston—I find your _outrecuidance_—” “Outer which?” said the Mogul freight. “Simple cylinders are good enough for me.” “Perhaps I should have said _faroucherie_,” hissed the Compound. “I don’t hold with any make of papier-mache wheel,” the Mogul insisted. The Compound sighed pityingly, and said no more. “Git ’em all shapes in this world, don’t ye?” said Poney, “that’s Mass’chusetts all over. They half start, an’ then they stick on a dead-centre, an’ blame it all on other folk’s ways o’ treatin’ them. Talkin’ o’ Boston, Comanche told me, last night, he had a hot-box just beyond the Newtons, Friday. That was why, _he_ says, the Accommodation was held up. Made out no end of a tale, Comanche did.” “If I’d heard that in the shops, with my boiler out for repairs, I’d know ’t was one o’ Comanche’s lies,” the New Jersey commuter snapped. “Hot-box! Him! What happened was they’d put an extra car on, and he just lay down on the grade and squealed. They had to send 127 to help him through. Made it out a hotbox, did he? Time before that he said he was ditched! Looked me square in the headlight and told me that as cool as—as a water-tank in a cold wave. Hot-box! You ask 127 about Comanche’s hot-box. Why, Comanche he was side-tracked, and 127 (_he_ was just about as mad as they make ’em on account o’ being called out at ten o’clock at night) took hold and snapped her into Boston in seventeen minutes. Hot-box! Hot fraud! that’s what Comanche is.” Then ･007 put both drivers and his pilot into it, as the saying is, for he asked what sort of thing a hot-box might be?