the wrong-doing which was rampant, through excess of
opportunity and more than abundant temptation, in the higher circles,
ran also through all grades of the service; and there was one case at
least of a railway company which used in fact to have to discharge all
its servants of a certain class at intervals of once a month or
thereabouts. The Northern Pacific Railway line was opened across the
continent in 1883, and during the next twelve months it was my fortune
to have to travel over the western portion of the road somewhat
frequently. The company had a regularly established tariff of charges,
and tickets from any one station to another could be bought at the
booking offices just as on any other railway line in America or England.
But few people bought tickets. The line was divided, of course, into
divisions, of so many hundreds of miles each, the train being in charge
of one conductor (or guard) to the end of his division, where he turned
it over to his successor for the next division. It was the business of
the conductor to take up the tickets, or collect the fares, while the
train was running, and it was well understood among regular passengers
on the line that each conductor expected to receive one dollar to the
end of his division, no matter at what point a passenger entered the
train. The conductor merely walked through the cars collecting silver
dollars, of which he subsequently apportioned to the treasury of the
company as many as he saw fit. They were probably not many.

On one occasion I stood at a booking-office and, speaking through the
small window, asked the clerk for a ticket to a certain place. The
conductor of the train, already waiting in the station, had strolled
into the office and heard my request.

"Don't you buy a ticket!" said he to me. "I can let you travel cheaper
than he can, can't I, Bill?"--this last being addressed to the clerk
behind the window; and Bill looked out through the hole and said he
guessed that was so.

The company, as I have said, used to discharge its conductors with
regularity, or they resigned, at intervals depending on the periods at
which accounts were made up, but it was said in those days that there
was not a town between the Mississippi and the Pacific Coast which did
not contain a drinking saloon owned by an ex-Northern Pacific conductor,
and established out of the profits that he had made during his brief
term of service.

In the American railway carriages, th