be made daily across
pleasant hills and fields and then a hearty supper when you collect
fares enough to pay for it, and an infant's sleep here rocked by the
trains as they pass. Then up in the morning in jolly good time to get
the limekiln workers on the job by seven. Observe, young hobo," he says,
"that I keep nothing up my sleeve. The job is here for you to take or
leave, for better or worse; and I throw in this cap with the gold
braid," he says, unwrapping one of the bundles he carries.

"Gimme it," replies Tim with decision; and the suburban car arriving at
the moment, the driver turns in thirty-five cents as the day's revenue,
and Mr. Craney pays him seventy cents as wages and discharges him with
thanks.

"You are now installed, young manager, and so on," he tells Tim; and
after presenting the cap with gold braid, which comes down over his
manager's ears, he shows him how to reverse the horse and work the
combination of the harness, which is woven of wire and rope and old
trunk straps.

"All aboard, Barlow Suburban!" he calls then, so quickly that a young
lady passenger must run the last few steps and be assisted into the car
by himself.

"You will be most active as superintendent of motive power," he shouts
to Tim as he dusts the bony nag with the reins, and the battered little
car bumps along. "Old Charley is an heirloom who has come down to me
along of the cursed railway," he explains.

"Do not frighten away the gadfly which is his train dispatcher or he
will sit down in the track till the whistle blows."

Further instructions he gives also, and they have gone about a mile out
into the fields when the young lady passenger having dropped her fare
into the box rings the bell and is helped off at a wild-rose bush where
a path leads over a hill to a farmhouse.

"Sweet creature," says Mr. Craney with gloom. "Drive on!" And never a
word more does he speak till they reach the end of the line and the
house where he lives alone. "We are total strangers," he explains then,
"though she has boarded at the farmhouse half the summer and is named
Katy O'Hare and is telephone lady in town."

When Tim asks why Katy O'Hare and himself do not become acquainted: "'T
is the fatal circumstances of me," he answers; and invites his official
to dinner, unwrapping his other bundle.

The cheap old cottage is also fallen upon fatal circumstances, with
shutters and panes broken and seams of its walls opening to the weather;
the