And yet Congress did the very thing that the sagacious old Commodore Vanderbilt had predicted. It absolutely refused to pay for the fast mail trains, and they were taken out of service. There was another factor in the situation, however, and that always a lively factor--the public. When the man out in Sioux City found that his mail was again taking eighteen additional hours to reach him from New York, he rose up in all the fulness of upstrung wrath and let his Congressman hear from him. And he was only one of tens of thousands whose business comfort had been heightened, quite imperceptibly, by the new trains, and upset very perceptibly by their withdrawal. They were returned to service in 1877, and have since become so recognized and useful a function of the mail service that it would be a brash Congress or Postmaster General who would even attempt to tinker with them. * * * * * Sometimes you brush elbows with the railroad mail service. You notice perhaps, the big heavy car up forward in the long train, with its open door and its gallows-like crane for snatching mail-bags, at cross-road stations, where the through train does not even deign to slacken speed. If you have had an important and delayed letter to post, you may have breathed your little prayer of thanks to the railroad mail because you are able to drop it into the slot of a car that stood, that was halted for an impatient minute or two in its race overland. But these are hardly more than superficialities of the service. If you wish to come closer to its heart, present yourself sometimes just before dawn at one of the great railroad terminals of a really metropolitan city. You had better present yourself in spirit and not in flesh, because this busy time--when most honest men are asleep--is not a time when visitors are welcomed. The Government is singularly diffident about showing the inner workings of its Post-office Department. But these inner workings are alive and alert at three o'clock of the morning that you come to the platform sheds of the big terminal--you can see the shadowy outline of the darkened building itself rising up behind you. Most of its platforms which by day are constant and brisk little highways, are also darkened. The long files of empty coaches that line these platforms reflect in their many windows the signal lights of the outer yard. Now and again you catch the flicker of a pointed yellow light against the background of blackness--the bobbing of a watchman's lantern as he sees that all is well in the few hours of comparative quiet that come to this great terminal.