No moneys are received, none spent, without the knowledge and approval of the comptroller. He is really a fine balance-wheel of the system, a governor working in exact accord with the laws of the ancient and wonderfully accurate science of numbers. By his computations men rise, men fall. He is the keeper of the rule and keeper of the weight. His office organization reflects his own measure of accuracy. As a rule, an auditor of disbursements and auditors of tickets and of freight receipts report are his chief assistants at headquarters. A corps of sharp-eyed young men, each also having an almighty respect for mathematical accuracy, will be up and down the line for him, catching up careless agents on the one hand, and on the other gently showing them how to keep their accounts better, and conform more carefully to the company's established standards. Sometimes the car accountant, a man who watches the mileage of the company's cars travelling over other roads, and the equipment of other roads scurrying over the home system, reports to the comptroller, oftener, however, directly to the operating department. All these make a considerable office--an office which usually treads its monotonous path and rarely becomes nervously excited; an office to be well considered in the organization of the railroad. The work of that office falls quite naturally into three channels--as we have already indicated--passenger receipts, freight receipts and disbursements, and general accounts. In the passenger receipts the accounting has, of course, to do with the sale of tickets, and the cash fare collections made by conductors upon the trains. This would be simple enough bookkeeping if a good many years ago the interline or coupon ticket, entitling the bearer to ride upon several different roads, had not come into popularity. To apportion the revenue of a ticket between the half-dozen different lines upon which it has been used requires almost no end of system and accounting. Once a month each road has an accounting with its fellows, with whom it is engaged in selling through tickets. The coupons themselves are the vouchers, and cash balances of a single road--because of the freight as well as the passenger business--may be kept standing in the treasuries of several hundred other roads. It is a system quite as intricate, in itself, as the relations between city and country banking and yet it is only a single small phase of the conduct of the railroad. The auditor of ticket receipts must also, through this staff organization, make sharp examination of the tickets that are turned in by the conductors at the end of each day's run. He must see to it that the conductor is neither careless nor anything worse. In either of these cases he will bring the matter quickly to the attention of the operating department.