It is this “Eastern Standard Time” that gives the time-table its distinctive flavor.  Each train has been demoted one hour, and then, for fear that it would be too easy to understand this, an extra three or four minutes have been thrown in or taken out, just, so that no mistake can help being made.

In order to read the new time-table understandingly the following procedure is now necessary: 

Take a room in some quiet family hotel where the noise from the street is reduced to minimum.  Place the time-table on the writing-desk and sit in front of it, holding a pencil in the right hand and a watch (Eastern Christian Time) in the left.  Then decide on the time you think you would like to reach home.  Let us say that you usually have dinner at 7.  You would, if you could do just what you wanted, reach Valhalla at 6:30.  Very well.  It takes about an hour from the Grand Central Terminal to Valhalla.  How about a train leaving around 5:30?

* * * * *

Look at the time-table for a train which leaves about 2:45 (Eastern Standard Time).  Write down, “2:45” on a piece of paper.  Add 150.  Subtract the number of stations that Valhalla is above White Plains.  Sharpen your pencil and bind up your cut finger and subtract the number you first thought of, and the result will show the number of Presidents of the United States who have been assassinated while in office.  Then go over to the Grand Central Terminal and ask one of the information clerks what you want to know.

[Illustration:  “Listen, Ed!  This is how it goes!”]

They will be glad to see you, for during the last three days they have been actually hungering for the sight of a human face.  Sometimes it has seemed to them that the silence and loneliness there behind the information counter would drive them mad.  If some one—­any one—­would only come and speak to them!  That is why one of them is over in the corner chewing up time-tables into small balls and playing marbles with them.  He has gone mad from loneliness.  The other clerk, the one who is looking at the tip of his nose and mumbling Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, has only a few more minutes before he too succumbs.

* * * * *

And that low, rumbling sound, what is that?  It comes from the crowd of commuters standing in front of the gate of what used to be the 5:56.  Let us draw near and hear what they are discussing.  Why, it is the new time-table, of all things!

“Listen, Ed. This is how it goes.  This train that goes at 4:25 according to this time-table is really the old 5:20.  See?  What you do is add an hour”—­

“Aw, what kind of talk is that?  Add an hour to your grandmother!  You subtract an hour from the time as given here.  This is Eastern Standard Time.  See, it says right here:  ’The time shown in this folder is Eastern Standard Time, one hour slower than Daylight-Saving Time.’  See?  One hour slower.  You subtract.”