who can shoot through a long afternoon without
losing temper or flurrying; light-blue East Indians; Tyne-side men, slow
of speech and uncommonly strong in the arm; lathy apprentices who have
not yet "filled out"; fitters, turners, foremen, full, assistant, and
sub-assistant station-masters, and a host of others. In the hands of the
younger men the regulation Martini-Henri naturally goes off the line
occasionally on hunting expeditions.

There is a twelve-hundred yards' range running down one side of the
station, and the condition of the grass by the firing butts tells its
own tale. Scattered in the ranks of the volunteers are a fair number of
old soldiers, for the Company has a weakness for recruiting from the
Army for its guards who may, in time, become station-masters. A good man
from the Army, with his papers all correct and certificates from his
commanding officer, can, after depositing twenty pounds to pay his home
passage, in the event of his services being dispensed with, enter the
Company's service on something less than one hundred rupees a month and
rise in time to four hundred as a station-master. A railway
bungalow--and they are as substantially built as the engines--will cost
him more than one-ninth of the pay of his grade, and the Provident Fund
provides for his latter end.

Think for a moment of the number of men that a line running from Howrah
to Delhi must use, and you will realise what an enormous amount of
patronage the Company holds in its hands. Naturally a father who has
worked for the line expects the line to do something for the son; and
the line is not backward in meeting his wishes where possible. The sons
of old servants may be taken on at fifteen years of age, or thereabouts,
as apprentices in the "shops," receiving twenty rupees in the first and
fifty in the last year, of their indentures. Then they come on the books
as full "men" on perhaps Rs. 65 a month, and the road is open to them in
many ways. They may become foremen of departments on Rs. 500 a month, or
drivers earning with overtime Rs. 370; or if they have been brought into
the audit or the traffic, they may control innumerable Babus and draw
several hundreds of rupees monthly; or, at eighteen or nineteen, they
may be ticket-collectors, working up to the grade of guard, etc. Every
rank of the huge, human hive has a desire to see its sons placed
properly, and the native workmen, about three thousand, in the
locomotive department onl