asy to understand this, an extra three or
four minutes have been thrown in or taken out, just, so that no mistake
can help being made.

In order to read the new time-table understandingly the following
procedure is now necessary:

Take a room in some quiet family hotel where the noise from the street
is reduced to minimum. Place the time-table on the writing-desk and sit
in front of it, holding a pencil in the right hand and a watch (Eastern
Christian Time) in the left. Then decide on the time you think you would
like to reach home. Let us say that you usually have dinner at 7. You
would, if you could do just what you wanted, reach Valhalla at 6:30.
Very well. It takes about an hour from the Grand Central Terminal to
Valhalla. How about a train leaving around 5:30?

* * * * *

Look at the time-table for a train which leaves about 2:45 (Eastern
Standard Time). Write down, "2:45" on a piece of paper. Add 150.
Subtract the number of stations that Valhalla is above White Plains.
Sharpen your pencil and bind up your cut finger and subtract the number
you first thought of, and the result will show the number of Presidents
of the United States who have been assassinated while in office. Then go
over to the Grand Central Terminal and ask one of the information
clerks what you want to know.

[Illustration: "Listen, Ed! This is how it goes!"]

They will be glad to see you, for during the last three days they have
been actually hungering for the sight of a human face. Sometimes it has
seemed to them that the silence and loneliness there behind the
information counter would drive them mad. If some one--any one--would
only come and speak to them! That is why one of them is over in the
corner chewing up time-tables into small balls and playing marbles with
them. He has gone mad from loneliness. The other clerk, the one who is
looking at the tip of his nose and mumbling Lincoln's Gettysburg
Address, has only a few more minutes before he too succumbs.

* * * * *

And that low, rumbling sound, what is that? It comes from the crowd of
commuters standing in front of the gate of what used to be the 5:56. Let
us draw near and hear what they are discussing. Why, it is the new
time-table, of all things!

"Listen, Ed. This is how it goes. This train that goes at 4:25 according
to this time-table is really the old 5:20. See? What you do is add an
hour"--

"Aw, what kind