Its curriculum is unusual but it is valuable.  One moment it considers the best methods to “swat the fly”—­to drive him from the vehicle in which he is an unwelcome passenger; the next moment the class is being shown the proper handling of the linen closet, the proper methods of folding and putting away clean linen and blankets, the correct way of stacking in the laundry bags the dirty and discarded bedding.  The porter is taught that a sheet once unfolded cannot be used again.  Though it may be really spotless, yet technically it is dirty; and it must make a round trip to the laundry before it can reenter the service.

All these things are taught the sophomore porters by a wrinkled veteran of the service; and they are minutely prescribed in the voluminous rule book issued by the Pullman Company, which believes that the first foundation of service is discipline.  So the school and the rule book do not hesitate at details.  They teach the immature porter not merely the routine of making up and taking down beds, and the proper maintenance of the car, but they go into such finer things as the calling of a passenger, for instance.  Noise is tabooed, and so even a soft knocking on the top of the berth is forbidden.  The porter must gently shake the curtains or the bedding from without.

When the would-be porter is through in this schoolroom his education goes forward out on the line.  Under the direction of one of the grizzled autocrats he first comes in contact with actual patrons—­comes to know their personalities and their peculiarities.  Also, he comes to know the full meaning of that overused and abused word—­service.  After all, here is the full measure of the job.  He is a servant.  He must realize that.  And as a servant he must perfect himself.  He must rise to the countless opportunities that will come to him each night he is on the run.  He must do better—­he must anticipate them.

Take such a man as Eugene Roundtree, who has been running a smoking car on one of the limited trains between New York and Boston for two decades—­save for that brief transcendent hour when Charles S. Mellen saw himself destined to become transportation overlord of New England and appropriated Roundtree for a personal servant and porter of his private car.  Roundtree is a negro of the very finest type.  He is a man who commands respect and dignity—­and receives it.  And Roundtree, as porter of the Pullman smoker on the Merchants’ Limited, has learned to anticipate.

He knows at least five hundred of the big bankers and business men of both New York and Boston—­though he knows the Boston crowd best.  He knows the men who belong to the Somerset and the Algonquin Clubs—­the men who are Boston enough to pronounce Peabody “Pebbuddy.”  And they know him.  Some of them have a habit of dropping in at the New Haven ticket offices and demanding:  “Is Eugene running up on the Merchants’ to-night?”

“It isn’t just knowing them and being able to call them by their names,” he will tell you if you can catch him in one of his rarely idle moments.  “I’ve got to remember what they smoke and what they drink.  When Mr. Blank tells me he wants a cigar it’s my job to remember what he smokes and to put it before him.  I don’t ask him what he wants.  I anticipate.”