And then, I don't know how it was, I began to talk.

"Ingraham," I said, "the block is against you. Now, you may think you are a railroader because you draw circles and curly-cues on clean paper with a lot of high-priced toy tools when some one tells you to. But when you sneer at a man like Hawthorne, you make me think the business you are in is too heavy for you. You get in to clear, and watch Mac and me go by. We're going to show you," I said, "a few examples of firstclass railroading; and we're going to convince you that that amateur, Digby, out on the Midland, can't come anywhere. near an artist like Hawthorne.”

"What I'm going to tell you," I said, "happened the day I reported to Hawthorne for work-the morning of Johnson's wreck. You remember that, Mac. I had come in from Ohio the night before. on the General Manager's private car. I had been at the Golden Point Yard office, here at headquarters. I didn't like it. I was tracing cars. I didn't like anything except curley-cues-my kind, shorthand -and a quick set of keys in a typewriter, and good, clean, hot, small words like the railroad English Hawthorne could use. I wanted to write his stuff. I wanted to, bad. I knew all about him. So, the 'G. M.,' coming in on his car that night, just because I had not gotten up a hot box about going out with him, unexpectedly, when his own letter-writer was sick on Christmas night, leaving fourteen, more or less, sorrowing girls behind, and because I can take English and read it afterward, too, almost as fast as number two's time, why, 'the old man,' when I flagged him, said:

"O. K. You go to Hawthorne tomorrow when we get in, and tell him to give you the job; and, if he wants to, he can call me up.'

"I did it. I sat down in Hawthorne's room. He 'phoned 'the old man.' 'Bout two minutes later he pointed across his desk to the opposite seat, and said 'Sit in.' Just like clockwork. No recommendations from yardmasters, no 'correspondence through the usual channels,' just-Sit in.'

"I was as tickled as Jim Kelley is when 'the old man' says to him 'Clean up that

505 of yours; we're going car-riding.' Everybody on this road has seen Kelley grin when the old man' climbs up in 505's cab with him. And that's just the way I felt. Hawthorne just sort of smiled at me. That fellow has the pleasantest, sweetest smile of any man I know. He talked to me a little. He said 'I like to have the man that writes for me somewhere within reach pretty nearly all the time. Catch on? But for the love of God, don't follow me around so's it can be noticed. I don't want to look like a light engine held to the rails with a trailer. Catch on?'

"I was 'on,' all right. Understanding that man was always like making a time card for a one-train branch. So when he got up, a few minutes later, to get some little piece of information, and walked into 'D. O.'s,' as we used to call the dispatcher's room on this division, I made it my run to be examining the train sheet in there, just at his elbow.

"It was the Sunday before New Year's -nice Sunday morning, just like this, and about 11:10. Hawthorne and I got into that room just in time to see hellliteral, raging hell-break loose.

"Johnson was handling the Ohio Branch wire. Best dispatcher that ever got sparks out of a key. I got a look at Johnson's face. He went white, then he got red, then he turned green-sort of a yellowish green. He was yelling 'blue murder' in eighteen different kinds of cuss words. He wasn't talking just over the noise of the keys and sounders. He was screaming! I couldn't make out at first just what he was saying. No one could. Then we all listened to his key. I heard him say 'dam u,' 'dam u,' 'dam u,' over and over again, to 'H. O.,' operator at Houghton; then the same, only worse, to 'B. X.,' operator at Brixton. Then Hawthorne was 'on' to what was happening, and was coming for Johnson; and he, Johnson, why he just laid his head down on his arms on the desk, and sobbed and cried like a little child, moaning, 'Oh, my God!' 'Oh, my God!' over and over.

"Then I stepped up. I had been listening with all my ears. I was in pretty bad shape myself. I started to remark, and then I broke loose and shouted to Haw

and said: 'Don't you suppose I know that those trains are going to collide?'

"I guess I was shaking all over. I saw some of the boys drag Johnson out, still shrieking. The boss was trying to get 'B. X.' and 'H. O.,' first one, then the other. He couldn't raise a thing. Both those operators were right up in the air. When Johnson first got rattled, they

HE STARTED FOR THE TRAIN-LEVEL."

went with him. The time of 901 and 902 on the Brixton run was 20 minutes, each way, for each train. Everybody on the line, by that time, was 'on' to Johnson's slip up, and we all knew that those two trains had to meet, pilot to pilot, within six minutes, because there was no operator then between 'B. X.' and 'H. O.' and four of the ten minutes for each train had gone. Single track between 'B. X.' and H. O.,' too, you know, in those days.

"Well, I watched Hawthorne, and I began to get my nerve back, just from watching him. He still couldn't raise either 'B. X.' or 'H. O.' He began to unbutton his vest with his left hand. I'm telling this just as it happened. He had

a sort of smile around his mouth. Then, all at once, he shouted at me 'Get on number 4 wire, and tell Maxwell to get his wreck train out of Brixton as fast as he can after 901, and to let that engine whistle, scream! That's a good valley there, between Brixton and Houghton, and they may be able to whistle a warning to those fellows that something's wrong. Have Maxwell send a man down to the tower at 'B. X.,-a man-a man who can answer me when I call him on a train wire! Want a doctor on that train, too!

"Mac,'" he said-Mac, here, was a copying operator, then, in 'D. O.'-"get on No. 5 wire, and hike Smith's wreck train with the doctor out of Houghton after 902. Let him whistle from the minute he starts. Get an operator, a real, live one, into 'H. O.' tower!"

"That's all that artist said, Mac, isn't it? Great General Manager's reports! It was fine!

"Well, he had his coat and vest off by that time-right hand still trying to raise those two dead ones at 'B. X.' and 'H. O.' He had his ears on what we were doing, too. He asked why we weren't quicker. I got my wreck train out, and without waiting for him to ask-just instinct, you know-I brought him boots, pants, and a coat-all I could find in his wrecking clothes wardrobe, in the hurry. He started for the train-level, downstairs, with me hooked on behind. I heard him shout to Kennedy, Main Line dispatcher, as we were going out the door, that he was going to take 76's engine-76 was standing on the train level, just ready to go out-and to give him the track. That was three minutes by the watch before the trains could come together. Great General Manager's reports! That telegraphing took three minutes. Only three minutes! Mac and I didn't have to do any thinking in those days. Hawthorne did it for us.

"Well, getting to that depot level, I was holding him down like a trailer; but when I climbed into that light engine beside him, he just looked at me and stood for it.

"Mike Delevan was handling the throttle. He asked the boss what seemed to be the general trouble. Hawthorne said:

"Hit it up hot for Houghton. We're going to wildcat it from there half-way to Brixton, where I'm going to have 42 steel hoppers of coal all bound around with a woollen string in exactly two minutes. Give her a little more, Mike.'

"Delevan, of course, didn't know what he meant; but he knew the boss, all right, and I tell you he hit it up, good and plenty. And there, right there, that Sunday morning, on that crazy, jumping engine, with Hawthorne's heavy hand holding me down so I couldn't vibrate off, he calling me 'Harry' and 'my boy' and so on, I first understood and began to love the boss because he worried all the way out for fear those two train crews had not had the sense to jump if they saw they were coming together.

They did have sense enough, and time enough-in seconds-as it turned out, to jump; and that's what they did when they met, coming around the big curve

in the valley, the wreck train whistles not having been able to warn them.

"Johnson had no lives on his conscience as the result of his carelessness in letting the two trains in on the same track, although he went crazy himself, and we never got the rights of the whole thing. But Jim Harkins, the engineman of 901, would have died from loss of blood, the doctors said, if the wreck trains had been three minutes later, the other men being so much hurt they couldn't help him.

"So you see the stuff Hawthorne was made of. And that's why I say to you, Ingraham, when amateurs like you talk to me about Digby of the Midland, or any other amateur, I want to talk about ordering wreck trains before wrecks take place, instead of thirty minutes afterward, and-well, other fair examples of real, artistic railroading like Hawthorne's."

A

Marshall Field, who died January 16 in New York City, was the greatest merchant of his day-which means that he was the greatest merchant the world has ever seen. Last year his firm did a business of $120,000,CCO. Dying he left an estate estimated at from $125,000,000 to $200,000,000-the whole vast fortune being based upon the profits of a dry goods store.

In his career, the opportunity and the man-both singly, chosen out of all the ages by chance or Providence-met and were married. He lived fifty years in Chicago. During that time the city grew from a country village in a swamp to an imperial metropolis of 2,000,000 people. With the growth of the city grew the great States of the Middle West. When Marshall Field began his business career, the vast, fertile country of which Chicago was the center was sparsely settled and traversed chiefly by stage coach. Before he died the valley of the Mississippi was filled with prosperous cities and

thriving farmers, and Chicago had become the greatest railroad center of the world.

That was the opportunity.

But among all the thousands of ambitious, energetic men who were attracted to Chicago as iron filings are drawn to a magnet, Marshall Field was the one man who was most largely equal to the opportunity.

From his native farm in Massachusetts, he brought a strong physique, a clear eye, a New England conscience, and an inborn love for the life of buying and selling. The business rules printed at the head of this article, were prepared by his own hand, and probably represent with entire sincerity his own view of the causes of his success.

But they fail as all such rules must always fail-to take into account the personal factor in the equation. Other men. have been, perhaps, equally hard-working, honest, and industrious-and they did not succeed. They lacked the determined