We are tired of rates and the factors that go to make them, and inquire what is the A, B, C of a freight transaction between the railroad and a shipper. The traffic-man makes it quite clear to us. "When one of our agents receives a consignment of freight," he says, "he immediately issues a bill of lading to the shipper, or consignor, as a receipt and as a contract for the shipment. From his duplicate of this bill of lading he makes out a way-bill, or manifest, which will accompany the car until the freight reaches its destination. This way-bill describes the shipment and the car into which it has been loaded, specifies the shipping point and the destination, the consignor and the consignee, the rate and whether or not the charges have been paid in advance or are to be collected at destination. A copy of this way-bill is given to the freight-conductor, who gives the station agent a receipt for the consignment. At that place of destination a freight-bill, containing a description of the shipment similar to that of the way-bill, and showing in addition the total charge collected or to be paid, is rendered to the consignee, and his receipt is taken for the shipment when it is delivered." "It seems quite simple," you breathe softly. "It is not," is his reply, "for it has its complications. I'll show you one of them." We step through swinging doors of green baize and for a moment from a traffic into an operating department, but an operating department that for the telling in a work of this sort is best allied with the story of the freight traffic. The traffic-manager points to a man sitting at a square and littered desk, his thoughts with sturdy intent upon the mass of correspondence which he is quickly sifting. "He is the best car-service man in the country," says our guide; and you recall when you were in the auditor's office, that an accounting was being kept between the lines for the use of one another's cars that went on through runs off upon strange or "foreign" lines. The traffic-man continues: "Ours is not a big road, as some roads go. Yet we receive about 40,000 cars a month and, of course, deliver something like the same number in the same thirty days. Yet there is not an hour of any day of the month that this man cannot tell where any one of these cars is, just how long it has been upon our tracks, just how much free time the consignee has for unloading it, or just how much he will have to pay the railroad for his delay in emptying it, so it can get back into service once again."