Or perhaps faster and heavier engines are purchased, and a complete change of time-card is at once rendered necessary. For every through train runs as fast as it can run with safety. And as a road grows older, and time-card after time-card is made out, the running time of the trains is made more and more perfect, until there are long stretches where the engineer does not have to touch his throttle, so exactly does the running time of the train correspond with the best the engine can do. The passenger who remarks to a companion upon the smoothness of the running, and who glances with approbation at his watch as the train pulls into its destination exactly on time, does not know what patient and long experimenting it took to achieve that result. * * * * * “Ya-as,” drawled old Bill Williams, sarcastically, when I read the above paragraph to him. “Ya-as, that’s all very pretty in theory—but how about the practice, my boy?” I had to confess that I was weak in practice. But I knew that Bill was strong, for he had served over forty years at the throttle before an affection of the eyes had caused him to retire from active service and to open a railroad boarding-house, by means of which he still managed to keep in touch with the life of the road. “Wa-al,” he went on, taking a deliberate chew of tobacco, and putting his feet up on the railing of the veranda which ran across the front of the Williams House, “theory an’ practice air two mighty different things. Time-cards is usually built on theory, an’ it’s up to the engineer t’ maintain ’em in practice. The trouble is that time-cards is made out fer engines in puffect condition, which not one in ten is. So the engineer has to make up fer the faults of his engine—a good deal like a good rider’ll lift his hoss over a five-barred gate, where a bad one’ll come a cropper every time. So when y’ see a train that’s come a thousand mile, pull in on time to the minute, don’t you go an’ make the mistake o’ thinkin’ it was the engine, or the time-card, or even the dispatchers what did it, ’cause it wasn’t. It was the crews what brought thet there train through in spite o’ wind an’ weather an’ other folkses mistakes.” * * * * *