Here, then, is the polyglot material with which our section-boss must work. His name may be Smith, he may have come out of New England itself, and his little house there beside the track is probably as neat as yours or mine. He works long hours and hard, with his body, his hands, and his mind; the men under his authority are more apt to be inefficient than efficient; his responsibility is unceasing. It is not an easy job. And for it he is paid from sixty-five to ninety dollars a month--rarely more. A locomotive engineer is paid three times as much. Yet he is protected by the eight-hour day as his standard of employment, although it is more than likely that his actual hours of work may be even less than eight. And his responsibility is little greater than that of the section-boss. CHAPTER VI UNORGANIZED LABOR--THE STATION AGENT The primary schools of railroading are the little red and yellow and gray buildings that one finds up and down the steel highways of the nation, dotting big lines and small. You find at least one in every American town that thinks itself worthy of the title. And they are hardly less to the towns themselves than the red schoolhouses of only a little greater traditional lore. To the railroad their importance can hardly be minimized. They are its tentacles--the high spots and the low where it touches its territory and its patrons. To best understand how a station agent measures to his job, let us do as we have done heretofore and take one of them who is typical. Here is one man who in personality and environment is representative and the small New York State town in which he is the railroad's agent is typical of tens of thousands of others all the way from Maine to California. Brier Hill is an old-fashioned village of less than 10,000 population, albeit it is a county seat and the gateway to a prosperous and beautiful farming district. Two railroads reach it by their side lines, which means competition and the fact that the agent for each must be a considerable man and on the job about all of the time. Our man--we will call him Blinks and his road the Great Midland--has never lived or worked in another town. Thirty years ago he entered the service of the G.M. as a general utility boy around the old brick depot at twelve dollars a month. The old brick depot is still in service and so is Blinks.