The Brain Centre.

If these children were in their teens, and fairy tales were grown to ambitions, and if a genii could take them unseen, lest they be awed by the lustre of executive office appointments, into the General Manager's office they might find there an urgent vision or hear a message as pressing as Dick Whittington's.

More than one glass door of simple but fine panelling would swing silently behind them as they went through the noiseless passage to this room. Its suggestion of expert workmanship touched with beauty would give them thoughts of industry where usefulness might be the handmaid of loveliness and good taste serve utility.

The windows overlook the intricate system and mechanism of acres of railway yards where there is constant synchronized movement. A new line is thrown out to Johnsonville and traffic is continuously, daily and nightly, drawn from old lanes of traffic. The whistle of trains and their smoke do not come very near except as a symbol of thought and progress. For the thought, the conferences and the planning go deeply through a thousand details behind the whistles and the smoke.

The room, when it is empty, is like a well styled reception room; carpet of soft green on a compressed inlaid cork floor, furniture of mottled kauri with green leather easy chairs, walls panelled with a Georgian suggestion, generous curtains of dull rust, green-grained New Zealand stone about the fire place, and through all the modern simplicity we are slowly adopting into our homes.

Before the General Manager went to the Conference of Australian and New Zealand Railway Commissioners in Sydney, in July, he studied the plans of the new Christchurch Railway Station at the desk in this room. He took a photostat copy of the plans away with him, and on the day the photostat was being developed I watched the lines of it come up on the paper in the developer.

The department where this work is done is very fascinating, even to an unmechanically - minded woman, but when I try to catch again the feeling of the place I know myself to be a mere impressionist among the blueprints. The courteous and technical explanations fall on my mind as music does on the untrained ear, as sounds in which there is a meaning, but from which one gathers a spirit more than a set of facts.

Here are machines which photograph a tracing from one paper to another in any of a choice of colours without the necessity of a negative.

In a little room where a light filter is used—all the red is taken out of the light—one becomes aware that one has assumed the colours of a Frankenstein because the hands of the operator are also a weird green, pitted with purple.

The lines on the prints come up in the baths of solution while men talk, and one bends again over tracings of minutest detail which have taken many months to draw.

Patience, a satisfaction in work and modern processes, and a respect for the diligent and painstaking co-operation page 43 of other men pervade the monotones of conversation in these rooms.

And I look again out of a window, across to a small building apart. It is the staff social hall fitted with a library, a stage, and showers. And I think of the other halls in the main building, which are cafeteria for the staff in the day time and in the evening places for an occasional dance or a lecture. This is a club with both occupational and social ties. There is a binding and uniting fraternity in these things, and the few that I speak of are only facets of the community life that springs up, almost complete in itself, within the great structure of modern transport industry.