Once aboard the 5:37 the Commuter trails his way into the smoker. Jim, the brakeman, who is the source of all trustworthy information about the railroad, and who can even foreshadow the resignation of the president, has stored away the table and the cards. They are produced for the daily consideration of a dime and a game that runs week in and week out is ready to begin. Smith, of the Standard Oil crowd, drops into his seat; Higgins, the lawyer, into his; the others are quickly filled; packages--foodstuffs from the cheaper city markets and hurried purchases made at noon from handy shops--go into the racks, and the Commuter is oblivious until, as if by instinct, a familiar red barn goes flying backwards. The game is off again until to-morrow morning; he is sorting his own packages out of the rack. The train halts for a single nervous moment, and he is on the platform. The cars roll past him; the party are at a three-handed game now. The Commuter finds his way up a steep road to his home on the hillside, his very own home. It looks as sweet, set in there among the bushes and the trees, as it did the day he bought it; and that day it looked to him as Paradise. When night comes, there comes a peace and quiet, a peculiar country coolness in the air. The city is steaming from the hot day, and through the night the pavements and the roofs still emit heat. The Commuter has forgotten the city. He sleeps as he slept as a boy on a farm, where a city was but a hazy dream in his mind. When he awakes he is refreshed, invigorated. The country has repaid him for the trouble that he has taken to reach it. He goes into town again on that blessed 7:52, twice as good a workingman as the man who has the next desk to his, the poor chap who had to sit on the apartment steps until after midnight in order to get even a miserable degree of comfort. That is why the city goes out into the country. * * * * * The Commuter is apt to settle his thoughts upon himself, to forget that he is but an infinitely small part of a mighty home-going army that nightly calls all the passenger resources of the railroad into play. There are more than 100,000 of him alone in the metropolitan district around New York. The busy Long Island Railroad takes a host of him nightly off to the garden spots of that wonderful land from which it takes its name; the Central Railroad reaches off into the lowlands, and the Erie and the Lackawanna into the highlands of New Jersey; the New York Central and the New Haven tap the picturesque shores of the Hudson and the Sound.