Whenever I see a guard punching a ticket my mind will turn for a moment to the ticket-sorting section of the Accountancy Branch. Tickets from all lines of the North Island come into that room, but they are not fed into machines. They go into the hands of girls who show a skill which any professional. pitch-and-tosser might, envy. Each girl faces rows of boxes, each about six inches by six inches, bearing the names of stations. Flick! A ticket flies into a box as smartly and as surely as if it had been fixed to it with a strand of rubber, stretched out and released by the girl. Well, one feels rather ashamed to confess it, but one was more astonished by this nimble cleverness of fingers than by the magic of machines. I was invited to fossick in a box for a ticket that might have gone astray, but the search failed. It reminded me of a cry which I used to hear as a boy at A. & P. Shows, “every time a coconut.” Well, well, I can declare solemnly and truly that I have never been as clever in any of my tasks as those girls were in theirs.

This sorting makes the final check on tickets for auditing.