"Aggie, dear, I am not fit, darling. Oh, Aggie, for God's sake, do go away, dear, while I can let you go!" has a nasty look, my lad, and before a jury "It will never come before a jury," said Grier quietly, but there was look in his eyes She shook her head. "I am not going!" she that meant much. "Lorimer can exonerate declared. "Never again!" me, Hardy, and he will." "Poor, pitiful little soul," he whispered. "I am weak, dear, and there is this cursed appetite and you would hate me afterwards He closed his eyes resolutely and tried to lift his head from her clinging arms. "Hardy!" he called again desperately, but Hardy did not turn. And Agnes stooped again and laid her cheek against his lips. "You have given me my chance," she whispered, "and I refuse to take it. I will not leave you, Jack." He was able to walk home with Agnes. After that, he and Hardy spent the night together. Through the long hours they talked little, and that to the point, but neither slept. The result of their deliberations was that Hardy carried Lorimer a note from Grier next day that sent him incontinently to bed with a nervous headache. Grier, too, kept his own room that day, and no one molested him. Cartwright wondered much; things began to have a queer look, and He got to his feet somehow and held her in he tried several times to see Lorimer, but the his arms. "Come away, Jack!" she pleaded. "They will be back presently." But he only held her the closer, while the rain still fell drearily and the smoking torches faded, one by one, into darkness. sheriff kept to his bed and his room and would see no one. There was a wedding that evening in the Watson home. Hardy, who was one of the invited guests, sent for Lorimer; but the sheriff still obstinately refused to leave his room, until Then he yielded to It was Hardy, at last, who recalled them to Grier sent another note. the present, and its difficulties. the inevitable. "You had better come away, Grier," he said sternly, although his eyes were wet. "You are still under arrest, you know, and an unexplained criminal charge is hanging over you -one, too, that will puzzle your lawyer to explain away." Grier frowned. "I don't know how or why you appeared so opportunely to-night, Hardy," he said, "when you were supposed to be two hundred miles away and traveling in the opposite direction. But you were kind to me in the old days, and for the sake of the past and ― Agnes — I should like you to believe me when I say that although I am nominally guilty, I never had the slightest intention of diverting a cent that did not belong to me to my own use. It is a long story, Hardy, and part of it is not very creditable to me or others." Hardy's eyes met his gaze squarely. Grier received him alone. What passed between them none but Agnes ever knew. At the close of the interview, however, the two entered the sitting-room and faced the others. "I only wanted to say," said Lorimer in a low voice, "that there has been a mistake, and one which I sincerely regret. Mr. Grier was in the court-house night before last by my express invitation. By previous appointment it was understood that he was to meet me there. Mr. Grier was very reluctant to meet me at that time and that hour, and it was only after the strongest pressure was brought to bear that he yielded to my wishes. At the time of his arrest I tried to explain, but was given no time; tried to resist the mob His voice trailed into silence. Cartwright looked at him in utter surprise, as did the others; but he went away without another word. One by one his friends averted "I believe you, Grier," he said. "But it their faces as he passed. W BY BENJAMIN BROOKS HILE the "tallest building in the world"-which is always being built somewhere in New York-continues to absorb popular wonder and attention, and the great cantilevers and suspension-bridges continue to bear up under their weight of criticism without visible means of support, the most important but least spectacular individual concerned in their existence continues his unobtrusive subterranean operations almost unknown, except as he may from time to time annoy us with the blocking of a thoroughfare or the creation of a local earthquake. Thus the term "skyscraper" is an old one, while the term "earthscraper" was invented but yesterday. I have spoken of this retiring person as web-footed because, as with ducks and cranes and other animals thus endowed by nature, the business of his life is in the mud, the shifty quicksand, and under water; and whatever he may lack in the spectacular or picturesque, he is nevertheless most worthy of notice for his unequaled ingenuity. The web-foot engineer has three main problems to deal with: to support a tremendous weight over soft mud or quicksand; to open and maintain a clear passage through it; to drain it off and eliminate it altogether. Out of these three main problems grow an endless combination of difficulties that he must devise means of overcoming; but in all of them enters his archenemy, water-water, the basis of all big engineering, locater of railways and thoroughfares, THE SHIELD AT WORK IN THE JERSEY APPROACH OF THE HUDSON RIVER TUNNEL distributor of population, maker of treaties, destroyer of man's half-baked, faint-hearted attempts, but conserver of his truly great works. There is an old, shop-worn fallacy that the great man is always at hand awaiting the occasion that will bring him out of oblivion and put him on his mettle; but the two greatest cities in the world both waited years in an overcrowded, river-girt condition, loudly proclaiming the occasion for a great man; yet it was a long time before he came to liberate them. He appeared early in the last century to the city of London after that town had overflowed its bridges for generations, and he presented a scheme for driving a tunnel under the Thames through the comparatively soft clay. Everybody knew that so large a hole as a tunnel could not be dug and kept open under the Thames; but if a short, portable piece of completed tunnel could be continuously pushed ahead and added to from behind, what then? He conceived a steel contrivance just a trifle bigger around than the tunnel was to be, shaped in about the proportions of a baking-powder can, with no bottom and no top, but having a diaphragm or partition across the middle of it. When this had been sunk down and started on the line of the tunnel, the forward part of the shell would hold up the overhanging mud sufficiently so that men could work through little doorways in the partition, digging the earth from in front and loading it into cars to be carried out behind; and at the same time, on the interior of the after portion, other men could bolt together the steel or iron sections of the tunnel lining. A short section having been completed in this manner, the whole machine could push itself ahead with a kick that is, with powerful hydraulic jacks pressing against the completed part of the tunnel. Imagine having forced a large, empty sugar barrel horizontally into a bank of earth, first having knocked out both heads. By crawling into the barrel a man could, with considerable discomfort and perspiration, dig away the earth some little distance in advance of the barrel, and, given something to kick against, he could push himself and his barrel farther into the cavity he had dug. Now, if another man were to hand him the necessary staves and internal hoops, he could build a second and slightly smaller barrel partly inside Copyright by Underwood & Underwood WORKING WITH A STEAM DRILL IN FRONT OF years. The great cities had waited for it so long that they accepted it ravenously. Tunnels burrowed under the Thames, the Seine, the Hudson. Poor old tunnels that had set out without it and gone bankrupt at the discouraging rate of a few inches a week, took on a new lease of life and set out again at many feet a day; and they are going yet-all day and all night, steadily, blindly, but surely, on under the rivers to set the cities free. Of course the original idea has to be modified way is cut automatically with a large rotary cutter. If it is softer still and too mushy to be counterbalanced by compressed air, then the top of the forward shield is made very long, so as to let the mud cave in on a long slant and still not fall from above. When it gets to the consistency of porridge, as it is at the bottom of the Hudson, it is found possible to force the somewhat for every particular tunnel and for each variety of mud. If the mud is full of gravel and boulders, the forward half of the machine has to be worked under compressed air to balance the pressure of earth and water; and the workers have to be provided with safety locks in case of a sudden inrush of water. If you invert a glass in a bowl of water and press it down, the water will not rise to any extent in the glass. On this principle, little inverted steel pockets are Courtesy of the Foundation Company, New York TWO VIEWS SHOWING A CAISSON IN PROCESS OF CONSTRUCTION made for the men to retreat into in case of accident and keep their heads above water until assistance can come. If, on the other hand, the earth is tough and regular, instead of being dug out by miners the AN shield ahead without any digging, merely letting the mud ooze through the partition doors and shoveling it into the cars. At times it was thought possible to force ahead without opening the doors at all-merely pushing the mud out of |