In addition to the railroad selling its tickets there are also railroad passenger traffic organizations, half a dozen or more important ones across the country, which are engaged in selling various forms of railroad transportation. In some cases this takes the shape of a mileage-book which may be honored by fifteen or twenty different lines. The book will perhaps be sold for $25.00 and will permit of 1,000 miles' riding at a saving over local fares, if the purchaser comply with its provisions. If he has complied with its provisions within the year's life of the book, he will be paid $5 rebate upon return of its cover which has given him his riding at two cents a mile. Sometimes these books take the form of "scrip" which is silent upon mileage but which has its strip divided into five-cent portions, sold at wholesale, as it were, at a fraction less than five cents each. In any case, there is more work for the auditor who handles passenger receipts, and if the railroad is in New York State, for instance, where there is quite a model law in effect regulating these things he will have to be very careful how he handles the accounts for these peculiar mileage books. The law tells him that he must not credit the whole $25 to passenger receipts, for the law seems to point to even finer lines than the comptroller. He cannot even subtract the $5 which will probably return to the purchaser, and charge the $20 to receipts. The mileage-book sales must be credited to a separate account, and only transferred to the main receipts of the railroad as the strip is turned in for passage, a few miles at a time. Do you wonder then that the comptroller sometimes grows gray-haired, that the vast routine of his office swells tremendously from year to year? The passenger receipts are almost always less than half of the income accounts of his offices. They are the A, B, C compared with the delicious tangle that comes when the freight waybills come in by the hundred thousand, and each little road must receive the last penny due to it. That feature alone will sometimes keep 400 clerks scratching their pens in a single office, will involve many, many more balances and cross-balances between the railroads. And beyond that complication is still another, the constant investigation and settlement of freight claims that come pouring in against the railroad. There is another job for a staff of competent men. If it is an overcharge claim, the routine is comparatively simple. The audit office should have information at hand sufficient to decline the claim or settle it immediately. But if the claim is for lost or damaged freight, the thing complicates. Before the freight claim department will draw a voucher against the treasurer, it will have to assure its own conscience that the claim is fairly substantiated by the facts.