People began to take an interest.  They brought or sent in personal experiences.  A commercial traveler, on the 7.50 train (arriving at 10.01, that day), having lost a big order through missing an appointment, told the “Clarion” about it.  A contractor’s agent, gazing from the windows of the stalled “Limited” out upon “fresh woods and pastures new” twenty miles short of Worthington, what time he should have been at a committee meeting of the Council, forfeited a $10,000 contract and rushed violently into “Clarion” print, breathing slaughter and law-suits.  Judge Abner Halloway and family, arriving at the New York pier in a speeding taxi from the Eastern Express (five hours late out of Worthington), just in time to see the Lusitania take his forwarded baggage for a pleasant outing in Europe, hired a stenographer (male) to tell the “Clarion” what he thought of the matter, in words of seven syllables.  Professor Beeton Trachs, the globe-trotting lecturer, who arrived via the “M. and M.” for an eight o’clock appearance, at 9.54, gave the “Clarion” an interview proper to the occasion of having to abjure a $200 guaranty, wherein the mildest and most judicial opinion expressed by Professor Trachs was that crawling through a tropical jungle on all fours was speed, and being hurtled down a mountain on the bosom of a landslide, comfort, compared to travel on the “Mid and Mud.”

All these and many similar experiences, the “Clarion” published in its “News of the M. and M.” column.  It headed them, “Stories of Survivors.”  For six weeks the railroad endured the proddings of ridicule.  Then the Fourth Vice-President of the road appeared in Mr. Harrington Surtaine’s sanctum.  He was bland and hinted at advertising.  Two weeks later the Third Vice-President arrived.  He was vague and hinted at reprisals.  The Second Vice-President presented himself within ten days thereafter, departed after five unsatisfactory minutes, and reported at headquarters, with every symptom of an elderly gentleman suffering from shock, that young Mr. Surtaine had seemed bored.  The First Vice-President then arrived on a special train.

“What do you want, anyway?” he asked.

“Decent passenger service for Worthington,” said the editor.  “Just what I’ve told every other species and number of Vice-President on your list.”

“You get it,” said the First Vice-President.

Thus was afforded another example of that super-efficiency which, we are assured, marks the caste of the American railroad as superior to all others, and which consists in sending four men and spending several weeks to do what one could do better in a single day.  In the course of a few weeks the Midland & Big Muddy did bring its service up to a reasonable standard, and the owner of the “Clarion” savored his first pleasant proof of the power of the press.