The general manager is responsible not only for the lives of the traveling public, but of the army or railroad employees under him and he is supposed to know everything, and must always be prepared to do the right thing in the right place at the right time, and as in many cases life and death depend on it, he must know how. [Illustration: The Close of My Railroad Career] A college education does not make a railroad manager, although it may help to do so. He in a great measure gets his education in the school of experience, and in some cases it is a hard school, and the most exacting of all schools, but at the same time it is a school in which one can learn anything under the sun, and learn it well, and in these days of the twentieth century's activity and progress, it is the man who knows how to do things that makes the world move. And after boiling everything down there is left in the pot two undisputable facts. They are that the railroad men cause the world to move by knowing how to do things, the other is that the railroad men move the people who live in the world, thus they move things all around. And they are continually on the move themselves, which goes to prove that they are different from many other people inasmuch as they practice what they preach. And from these men of all classes from the president down I have received courtesies and the kindest of consideration, and these pleasant associations are pleasant memories to me and will always remain so. It was my pleasure to meet and to chat with George M. Pullman, the father of the sleeping car, several times, and I found him to be a fine man, broad-minded in every sense of the word, always approachable and with always a kind word for every one of the large army of his employees that he met on his travels, and he always tried to meet them all. It was also my pleasure to meet his two boys who are veritable chips of the old block. One of the legends connected with the western mining history is that early in the 60s George M. Pullman was a poor prospector and had secured a lease on a piece of mining ground in Colorado, and that he formed the idea of the sleeping car from the tiers of bunks in the miners' lodging house, "bunk houses" they are called. However that may be Mr. Pullman has been the recipient of many a blessing from the weary traveler, and the idea, whatever it was, that led him to invent the sleeping car that has proved such a comfort to the traveler of today, deserves to go down in history as the greatest idea that ever came from the place where ideas come from.