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Tampa lay in the pine-covered sand-flats at the end of a one-track railroad, and everything connected with both military and railroad matters was in an almost inextricable tangle.

Among the passengers on a train on a one-track road in the Middle West was a talkative jewelry drummer. Presently the train stopped to take on water, and the conductor neglected to send back a flagman. An express came along and, before it could be stopped, bumped the rear end of the first train. The drummer was lifted from his seat and pitched head first into the seat ahead.

It is only a very hardened philanthropist, or an unsophisticated beginner in good works, who can look a sociologist in the eye. Most persons, when they do one thing, begin to apologize for not doing something else. They are like a one-track railroad that has been congested with traffic. They are not sure which train has the right of way, and which should go on the siding.

Then the spider, suddenly as immobile as a lump of stone, was drawn up into the heavens by the roaring yellow thing, and disappeared. A wasp had struck, and had obtained another meal. "Thank God that thing had a one-track mind, and was concentrating on the spider," said Jim, with a rather humorless laugh. Dennis was silent.

With my perfectly ordinary notions of comfort in traveling, I found that it would take me two days to get to Hebron. It was beyond all the resorts that people flock to: beyond, and "cross country" at that. I must have journeyed on at least three small, one-track railroads after leaving the Pullman at some junction or other.

Back in the sixties, when this grizzled railroad chieftain was the chief factor in the rapidly growing New York Central Railroad system, whose backbone then consisted of a continuous one-track line connecting Albany with the Great Lakes, the president of a small cross-country road approached him one day and requested an exchange of annual passes.

House said to me that he had seen the President and the President had said he had a one-track mind and was occupied with Germany at present, and he could not think about Russia, and that he had left the Russian matter all to him, Col. House. Therefore I continued to deal with Col. House directly on it inasmuch as he was the delegate of the President, and Lloyd George, in the matter.

As he looked out and listened, his imagination took fire again, as it had taken fire that day in the waiting-room at Blake City, when he had learned that the little, one-track G.&M. was trying to hinder the torrent of the Northern wheat. Well, the wheat had come down.

MY DEAR COLONEL: Every day I am confirmed in the judgment that my mind is a one-track road and can run only one train of thought at a time! Forgive me, and forget my manners! Faithfully, yours, WOODROW WILSON. Franklin Square New York, January 4, 1912.

He slid silently into the water with his rags clinging to him and started swimming up the river against the ebbing tide. He had a simple, short-sighted, one-track mind. It never occurred to him that by undressing he might return and don his dry clothes again, such as they were. He had always gone in swimming with his rags on and he was his own clothesline; they dried upon his back.