Three minutes late! Seventeen minutes ago the last of the smoking-hot forms came from that newspaper's stereotyping rooms and here are the first ten thousand copies of the morning's run--fresh and damp smelling of the forest. Before the driver began his hurried explanation of delay, the copies were being thrown into the last car. He had hardly finished before a big bell, high-hung somewhere in the invisible blackness, speaks its one brief note of authority; lanterns are raised alongside the full length of the train--the seven big cars are softly getting into motion. And before this train is fully in motion the newspaper's messengers are busy with the papers that have been thrown in at the open door; before it has bumped its way over the wide-spreading "throat" at the entrance of the terminal, they are bringing the first semblance of order out of the miniature mountain of newspapers piled high on the car floor. Chaos, did we say? Well, hardly that. The circulation manager of the metropolitan morning newspaper has been called a "field marshal of the empire of print," and field marshals incline to order rather than to chaos. It is less than seventeen minutes from the first of that torrent of newspapers pouring from the hopper of the grinding press, yet here they are, each in an accurate bundle of not more than two hundred and fifty copies, and accurately tagged. The label of each bundle bears in big clear letters the news company or dealer to whom it is consigned, the town, the railroad and its connections. There is not much chance for errors here. As the newspaper messengers begin to arrange their stock--the papers for the nearest towns on top so that they may be most easily reached, to be thrown off while it is still dusk, so that Mr. Early Riser may read his favorite metropolitan journal as he sips his breakfast coffee--so are the mail-clerks in the cars ahead bending to their tasks. Roundabout them are rows of pouches held in iron frames, with their hungry throats held wide open, and infinite racks of small pigeon-holes--the same kind that you remember in the up-country post-offices. When the pouches first come into the car they are opened and their contents "dumped-up," to use the parlance of the service, upon the shelf-like tables that run the length of the place. The next process is "facing-up"--bringing addressed sides of all the matter uppermost for facility in distribution. And after that the distribution itself--no easy matter when all the world is constantly writing to all the world, and the criss-cross currents are all but innumerable.