This superintendent has his division 400 miles away from New York, a clean stretch of busy railroad, making a link in one of the stoutest of the transcontinental chains, 300 miles of line, making traffic and handling it. The superintendent is a personage in the little inland city where headquarters are located; his opinion is eagerly sought by the local reporters each time a new civic problem is tackled. If he were in the metropolitan district he would be unknown except to a little coterie of railroaders; up here he is the voice of the railroad. He is far more real to the folk of half a dozen populous counties than is the president of the road, a stuffy gentleman who comes up in a private car once in a dozen years to the dinner of the local Chamber of Commerce and tells the townspeople to thank God that they have the main line of the K. & M. running through their "lovely little city." You may listen for the clatter of the telegraph key in his house and be entirely disappointed. "I would have poor system if I had to listen to all the gossip of the wire," he tells you quietly. "We've organization on this stretch of line." He says this with a bit of pride. "We have men and we have system. My train-masters are in effect assistant superintendents: they are expected to organize beneath them." Watch this sort of man. He is the kind that American railroading is hungry for to-day. Of him the big executives are being made each year. He enters his office in the morning and gets a few brief reports of the situation on the line: first weather, then congestion conditions in the big yards. After that he talks over the long-distance 'phone with the G. M., four hundred miles away. He gives a summary of the situation to headquarters, just as the summaries came in to him from his train-masters at junctions and at terminals. He holds the telephone receiver for a minute: the 'phone is rapidly coming into general railroad use since the telegraphers made Congress pass a bill limiting their working hours to eight each day. That bill promises to make trouble yet for the men who were supposed to benefit by it. The telephone speaks to him a moment. He hangs up the receiver and speaks to his chief clerk. "W. H. T. is coming up the line this afternoon. Tell the boys not to get rattled," he says. That is all. The passage of the President of the United States over his three hundred miles of well-ordered track makes no flutter in this superintendent's heart. If it were Europe--the troops would be drawn out, all other trains brought to a standstill, pilot engines run in advance of the royal train, in infinite pow-wow over the railroading of nobility. But it is not Europe, it is this blessed United States, partly blessed because it so excessively differs from Europe.