The old R. W. & O. was compelled in its day and generation to assume some pretty hard, human handicaps. But Britton was a mighty asset to it. He loved his work. It was a real and an eternal delight to him to achieve the things that he had set out to do. He was always approachable, obliging and ready to meet all reasonable requests that came within his power; he had the faculty of making friends of those who came in contact with him, and of retaining their friendship. A man's man was Hiram M. Britton, a railroad captain of great alertness, and possessed not only of vast enthusiasm, but also of a wondrous ability for hard work. The hard problems of his job never feazed him. Even the winter snows--forever its _bete noire_--did not discourage him, not for long, at any rate. He came, as came so many men from outside the borders of the North Country, with something like a contempt for its midwinter storms. Before Britton had been long on the job, however, the line from Potsdam to Watertown was completely blocked for four long days, and he learned that it was all in a day's work when the ticking wires reported two engines and a plow derailed at Pulaski, two more off at Kasoag, and not a train in or out of Watertown for more than thirty hours. At all of which he would relight his pipe and send a few telegrams of real encouragement up and down the line. That is, he sent the telegrams when the wires remained up above the tops of the snow-drifts and the men were using them to hang their coats upon as they shoveled the heavy snow. Ofttimes the wires went down, and once in a while they were deliberately cut--by some harassed and nerve-racked, snow-fighting boss. That was before the days of the famous Dewey episode at Manila, but the emergency at the moment must have seemed quite as great. At any rate the Gordian knot, translated into a thin thread of copper wire, was cut--not once, but frequently. I myself, in later years, have seen a Superintendent go into our lower yard at Watertown late at night when congestion piled upon congestion, when the zero wind whistled up through the flats from down Sackett's Harbor way, and the evening train up the line nestled somewhere near Massey Street crossing in a hopelessly inert and frozen fashion, and clean up the mess there. Once one of these inbound trains from down the line coming down the long grade into the yard crashed into a snowbound freight there, and split the caboose asunder, as clean a job as if it had been done with a sharp ax. There were six men asleep in the caboose--to say nothing of two in the cab of the oncoming train, and yet no lives were lost. Even though the Watertown Fire Department spent most of the rest of the night putting out the fearful blaze that arose from the wreckage. Corn meal was spread bountifully about atop of the snow, and no one on the flats lacked for pudding the rest of that winter. * * * * *