Do not insult the intelligence of that engineer. A little while before, he had told us, with a deal of pride, that the rolling stock of "his road" placed end to end would reach from New York to Omaha, a distance of some 1300 miles. Keenest of the keen, he had a sort of contempt for a rule-book in such a case as that. "Isn't it sort of positive?" we began. "Good excuse anyway--" "It is," he shouted back, "but somehow it don't go if you fall behind on your running time. We're here to use ordinary good sense--and bring our trains in on time." And yet the railroad has a sharp way of insisting upon compliance with that book of rules by making, once in a great while, surprise tests. A signal is set at danger, without any more apparent reason than in the case just cited; a secret watch is kept, and judgment and discipline are visited upon the heads of the engineers who permit themselves to run past it. * * * * * To operate the signals calls for one body of men, and to maintain them for faithful service against all manner and stress of wear and weather, another; just as there must be a working corps to keep the right-of-way in working order. This last is a mighty brigade of the railroad's army; for one man in every four who works for it is employed in keeping the track in order. One dollar in every six that the railroad spends goes for that purpose. Maintenance of way on each division divides itself into a superintendent of bridges and buildings, who sees to the upkeep of those facilities; and a roadmaster, who specializes upon the track itself. This last officer, almost invariably one who has begun to shoulder himself up in the ranks of the railroad army from the very beginning, has his territory divided into sections from two to five miles in length on double-track, from four to ten on single. In command of each section a faithful hand-car and a group of more or less faithful section-hands, figured on an allowance of one to each mile of track, is a section-boss. The section-boss is a wry and a wise soul, or should be. He may not know as much about the formulas for compensating curves as that bright boy who has just come out of a "tech" school to stand his turn at a transit, but he has a marvellous sort of intuitive sense in keeping his little stretch of track in order. He can sight his rail and discover flaws in alignment as a blind man can find surface flaws with the developed tips of his fingers, and all the while he may be growling at the railroad management for adding to the weight of its rolling-stock and "pounding the elevations out of his track."