From these receipts, combined with those from rentals of express or telegraph privileges or the like, the railroad pays its bills--pays its men, as we have already seen. It pays its taxes and its bond coupons and its fire insurance, and apportions these as far as possible over the twelve months of the year that it may keep a fairly even balance between receipts and expenditures. The other bills are paid by properly signed and attested vouchers, which are bankable like checks, and which are indeed the very best form of check, because they are upon their face a receipt stating the precise reason for which a certain sum of money was paid. In recent years the comptroller, or the auditor, as you may prefer to call him, has become more and more of a statistician. He prepares tables as to locomotive performances, obtaining his figures from the mechanical department; he can tell you to an ounce the average carload of the system for any given month. He fairly seems to revel in his own development of the science of numbers. Train and car statistics will probably show the number of trains of different classes, the mileage of the same, the mileage of empty and of loaded cars, and the direction of their movement. Locomotive statistics run to mileage, consumption of fuel and of stores, and the cost of labor and material for repairs. In addition to all these the comptroller will probably prepare statistics of locomotive performances--so many miles to one ton of coal and one pint of oil. Then he will show the average cost of coal by the ton and of oil by the gallon, for the railroad never forgets the cost. It is cost that really makes the excuse for these great statistics; cost and revenue, analyzed and reanalyzed in half a hundred different ways. The statistics are the thermometers, the very pulse by which the health of the railroad is acutely judged. Sometimes the statistics become graphic, and the comptroller, through some of the keen-witted men in his office, prepares charts, in which statistics become "curves of averages" or jotted and wriggling lines, with each jot and each wriggle full of meaning. "Government by draughting-board," sniffs the old-time railroader as he sees these great "cross-hatched" sheets with their crazy lines of intelligence spun across them, but it is "government by draughting-board" that has made the old-time railroader--well, the old-time railroader. The new-time railroader gives heed to those charts--the pulse readings of the creature that he is directing--guides his course in no small way by them. They are veritable charts by which he may pick his way quickly and safely.