best you
can, and the ablest underwriter is the man who tells the closest. A
really good underwriter should know the hazards of all the ordinary risks
in the world, and be able to tell you offhand what is the danger point in
a brewery, a playing-card factory, a paper mill, a public school, a
shovel works, a Catholic church, a chemical laboratory--every sort and
kind of risk. Of course he has surveys, made by inspectors, to help him,
showing details the map fails to show, such as the location of your
piano, and where the hazards lie and how they are cared for. But
inspectors are fallible, and he must _know_--everything."

"You make my head whirl," Helen said. "To know everything! It sounds
colossal. Do you know everything?"

Smith laughed.

"No," he replied. "Decidedly not. I'm afraid I know only a very small
proportion of what I ought. But the big men of the business do. There
is one man who I verily believe is perfectly familiar with every kind of
risk in the United States. If there is a chemical process he doesn't
know or can't find out about, I'll eat the thing myself. He knows every
explosive mixture, every fulminate, every sort or manner of dust, paste,
or grease which burns or explodes of itself."

"But that one man must be a genius! What does the average man do?
Doesn't he need some one to help him in all this? It sounds like such a
terrific undertaking to keep track of so many things. Doesn't it make
your own head swim at times?"

"Well," said Smith, "of course there are a thousand and one things in the
nature of aids to the underwriter--things whose proper action he doesn't
directly control, although he has to keep a father's eye on them to see
that they don't run amuck."

"Such as what?" asked the girl.

"The inspectors I spoke of, for one thing; the map makers who make the
pretty brown buildings in Deerfield Street; the rate makers who go around
applying schedules to buildings, and from the various hazards of
construction, occupancy, and exposure fixing the rate which the schedule
brings out; the stamping bureaus that check the rates as the agents send
through the business. And then there are the field men, called special
agents, who travel from agency to agency, appointing and discontinuing
agents, straightening out difficulties, adjusting losses, and making
themselves generally useful. All these the underwriter has to help him,
as well as information such as building inspections by