"We're preference freight, if you please, and no old bumpety-bump with coal and ore taking the low-grade tracks. They sandwich us in among the all-Pullmans, even when we're on the four-track divisions, for food is quick; food won't keep forever; and those folks down in the city are getting hungry." He starts to say more, but the engine call halts him. The block is clear once again. The conductor catches a car step, the "preference" starts forward with all the rattling shakes and bumps peculiar to a long freight train. In a minute or two the red tail-lights are grinning at us from half a mile down the track. Another big freight goes scurrying by us--more market stuff, more meat, more fish for the hungry town, a town which houses 4,000 folk within a single congested tenement square. A third train follows; all refrigerator cars it is too. They come in quick succession, these market trains, to the metropolis. The railroad is doing its part. To-night again, the food is going up to the city. The scene changes. Now we are off in the rolling country of up-State--dairy country, if you please. The railroad that stretches its thick black trail the length of the valley is no four-track line, with heavy trains coursing over it every three or four or five or ten minutes. This is but a single-track branch; in the parlance of the railroaders it is a "jerkwater"; and the coming of its two passenger trains and that of the way-freight each day are events in the little towns that line it. Still, even this little branch is doing its part in the filling of the city's larder. This branch has the filling of the city babies' milk bottles as its own particular problem. At early dawn, the muddy brown roads that lead to the little depot there at the flour mills are alive. The farmer boys are bringing the milk to the railroad. Down the track a few hundred yards beyond the depot is the slick, clean, new milk-station. Over across the brook is the cheese-factory, deserted and given over to the gentle fingers of decay. Those two buildings tell the story of changing times; in their mute way they tell the growth of the American city. In other days this township made cheese. To-day they drive the milk to the depot. Each morning finds a big refrigerator car, built in the fashion of passenger equipment, so that it may be handled on passenger trains, at the milk station. The farmer boys are prompt with their milk, it is checked and weighed and placed in the car, in cans and in bottles. Hardly has the last big ten-gallon can gone clattering into the car before the whistle of the warning local is heard up the line, just beyond the curve at the water-tank. While the train is at the depot, in all the bustle of the comings and goings at a country station, the engine makes quick drill movement and picks up the milk-car.