“You leave Jersey City in a sleeper, supplied with all of the latest appointments for comfort; a courteous conductor takes your tickets, with which you have no further concern until you reach Charleston, when they are handed to you in an envelope. What a comfort not to have to be pulling out the everlasting ticket just in the midst of conversation or while reading an interesting magazine article! “If the cars are not crowded, you feel a sort of proprietary right to roam around at pleasure, change your seat as often as you desire, and wash your face and your hands whenever they need it in the cosy little toilet-room. What a change from the old-fashioned water-cooler, where a cupful of water was wont to be poured over a pocket-handkerchief, and the face and hands wiped with it, leaving arabesque designs in black and white wherever it touched! “Then, instead of rushing to a railroad eating-house in order to refresh the inner man, having to put up with ‘railroad coffee,’ and experiencing a nervous shock every time a whistle blows, your meals are taken at dainty little tables, in your own compartments, where polite and efficient waiters do your bidding. “Instead of the tiresome, old-fashioned trip of two days and a night, the trip now is twenty hours. Verily the twin powers of steam and electricity have wrought wonders in the conditions of life. “The Plant System, to which the Atlantic Coast Line is ‘a feeder,’ has emphatically gridironed the South. To-day Mr. Henry B. Plant is the president of a railroad system that embraces twelve different corporations, and whose mileage extends to 1941, with a list of employees numbering 5506. He is also president of the Plant steamship and steamboat lines, covering the coasts of the Gulf, Cuba, and Jamaica, and skirting the coasts of the North, running from Boston along Nova Scotia to Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island. In addition to these interests, Mr. Plant is president of the Southern and Texas Express companies, which do a business as express forwarders over 24,412 miles of railway, and have lines in fifteen States, employing 6808 men and using 1463 horses and 886 wagons. Mr. Plant is seventy-six years of age. He needs no eulogy; his works speak for him. Although of Northern birth, he is as much beloved and respected at the South as if native-born. “Thirty-six years ago, President Jefferson Davis, of the Southern Confederacy, demonstrated his confidence in, and admiration of Henry Bradley Plant by giving him a pass entitling him to move hither and thither at will through army headquarters, or wherever he pleased, in the interest of the Adams Express Company, which he then represented, although Mr. Plant declared that he did not sympathize with the political movement which sought to rend the States.