de of the Twentieth Century shall have closed.

It is true that railroad schedules seldom call for mile-a-minute
traveling, but the engineer is called upon very frequently to go even
faster. The majority of people, even the most intelligent among those
who habitually travel, obtain their conceptions of speed from the
figures of the time-table, forgetting that in nearly every instance
considerable portions of the route must be traversed at much more than
the average speed required to cover the total distance in the schedule
time. There are very few, if any, of the fast express trains which do
not, on some part of each "run," reach or exceed a speed of a mile a
minute. Yet, by reason of superior roadway and well constructed cars,
the accelerated velocity is unnoticed; while running at from sixty to
seventy miles an hour the passenger calmly peruses his paper or book,
children play in the aisle, and a glass brim full of water may be
carried from one end to the other of the smoothly rolling coach without
the spilling of a drop. All the while the nerves of those in charge of
the train are kept at high tension, and, oblivious as the passengers may
be as to the danger, actual and imaginary, the risks incurred are never
for a moment lost sight of by the two men on the locomotive.

The man in the signal tower has an equal responsibility. In some
respects the burden upon his shoulders is even greater, because he has
the fate of perhaps a score of trains in his hands, with the lives of
hundreds of passengers. Now and then, when the wrong lever has been
pulled and a train is wrecked, we hear of a signal man sleeping at his
post, but few of us stop to think how many thousand times a day the
right lever is pulled, and how exceptional is the lapse from duty. There
are heroes of the sea, and there are heroes of the battle-field, but
there are ten times as many heroes who perform their deeds of heroism on
locomotives, in switch and signal towers, and in railroad yards. It may
not be fashionable to compare these savers of human life with those who
destroy life on the battle-field, but the valor and endurance of the
former is at least as conspicuous and meritorious as the daring and
suffering of the latter.

In "Scribner's Magazine" there recently appeared a most graphic
description of a two-storied, square signal tower at "Sumach Junction."

"This tower," says the contributor to the magazine named, "had two rows
of windows on all side