There is drama, too, when the railroad brings the food up to the city, for it counts as one of its greatest functions this filling of the city's larder. It sets aside certain high officers in its traffic department for the handling of market produce; it provides special facilities for gathering it, special facilities for moving it, special terminal facilities for delivering it in the hearts of the great cities. Sometimes it even goes further and provides and organizes great wholesale markets, building up its traffic by going as far as possible in facilitating the constant replenishing of the city's larder. That is why these long dark caravans, the fast preference freights that are the pride of the railroad's traffic head, go so quickly over the rails to town. One of them halts in block for an instant to let a brightly lighted passenger train go in ahead of it. While it is halted we climb aboard and engage its conductor in conversation. He is a clever fellow, of the type of the coming railroader. Only last summer, we found a freight conductor thumbing his "Sartor Resartus," and discussing Carlyle as a stylist. "Yes, we do bring some food up to town," he admits. "I've got enough grub aboard these eighty cars to feed several regiments. We've two refrigerators of meat from Omaha, two from Kansas City, one from Chicago. The Chicago car has been iced twice--at Elkhart and at Altoona. The other cars had to have an extra filling at Hammond, on the outskirts of Chicago. Soon we'll have crisp cold weather and we can cut out the icing. "The boss? The boss will be worrying still. Just as soon as he can cut down his refrigerating stations at the division yards, he'll be fretting about getting those big ice-houses filled for next summer. He's got a lake tucked up in the mountain divisions somewhere, and we've got a branch running in a couple of miles there, and we just pull out the ice during the winter months. You take any of these trunk-lines and it has to have a lake for its refrigerating stations. It's just one of the many little kinks in running a road." We express a desire to see the big preference train, and--the block being still set against her--we go forward in the black shadows of the cars, the train boss's arm-set lantern showing our way to us. He stops beside a string of white and yellow box-cars.