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This, however, is not the story of the Pullman car.  It is the story of that ebony autocrat who presides so genially and yet so firmly over it.  It is the story of George the porter—­the six thousand Georges standing to-night to greet you and the other traveling folk at the doors of the waiting cars.  And George is worthy of a passing thought.  He was born in the day when the negro servant was the pride of America—­when the black man stood at your elbow in the dining rooms of the greatest of our hotels; when a colored butler was the joy of the finest of the homes along Fifth Avenue or round Rittenhouse Square.  Transplanted, he quickly became an American institution.  And there is many a man who avers that never elsewhere has there been such a servant as a good negro servant.

Fashions change, and in the transplanting of other social ideas the black man has been shoved aside.  It is only in the Pullman service that he retains his old-time pride and prestige.  That company to-day might almost be fairly called his salvation, despite the vexing questions of the wages and tips of the sleeping-car porters that have recently come to the fore.  Yet it is almost equally true that the black man has been the salvation of the sleeping-car service.  Experiments have been made in using others.  One or two of the Canadian roads, which operate their own sleeping cars, have placed white men as porters; down in the Southwest the inevitable Mexicano has been placed in the familiar blue uniform.  None of them has been satisfactory; and, indeed, it is not every negro who is capable of taking charge of a sleeping car.

The Pullman Company passes by the West Indians—­the type so familiar to every man who has ridden many times in the elevators of the apartment houses of upper New York.  It prefers to recruit its porters from certain of the states of the Old South—­Georgia and the Carolinas.  It almost limits its choice to certain counties within those states.  It shows a decided preference for the sons of its employees; in fact, it might almost be said that to-day there are black boys growing up down there in the cotton country who have come into the world with the hope and expectation of being made Pullman car porters.  The company that operates those cars prefers to discriminate—­and it does discriminate.

That is its first step toward service—­the careful selection of the human factor.  The next step lies in the proper training of that factor; and as soon as a young man enters the service of the Pullmans he goes to school—­in some one of the large railroad centers that act as hubs for that system.  Sometimes the school is held in one of the division offices, but more often it goes forward in the familiar aisle of a sleeping car, sidetracked for the purpose.