simply learning to
do what he called the obvious thing. But the simple, little, obvious thing
is often the hardest for most people, including engineers, to see.

How He Met an Emergency.

In the building of one of the trolley tunnels under the Hudson, a careless
opening of the doors of the shield--the cylindrical cup pushed along at
the head of the bore, and by means of which all the digging is
done--caused the flooding of one hundred feet of the tunnel. It would be
as hopeless a task to try to bail that mixture of mud and water out as it
would be to drain the Hudson River and the bay adjacent thereto. Jacobs
saved the situation by a very simple expedient.

The cup defender Reliance had just been stripped of her canvas, and Jacobs
got this big spread of sail, sank it flat over the flooded part of the
tunnel, weighted it with a mixture of clay and stone, and thus mended the
bottom of the river so that it didn't continue to leak in mud and water.
It was so very simple that few people would have thought of it.

He completed his first Hudson tunneling work on the 11th of March, 1905,
and all he said when the work was done and he had walked through was:

"There isn't much to tell, except that Henry Hudson was the first man who
crossed over the river and Jacobs was the first man who crossed under it."

WAS INSULTED BY POE.

Romantic Life-Story of Poor Boy Who
Heard the Voice of the Muse in
an Iron Foundry.

Richard Henry Stoddard, who won fame as a poet, critic, and journalist,
fought his way upward through conditions that would have discouraged most
men. His parents were miserably poor and his father died while the boy was
still young. His mother was of a restless, wandering disposition, and when
Richard was ten years old she left her New England home and brought him to
New York. "Here," he says, "we landed at or near the Battery one bright
Sunday morning late in the autumn of 1835, and wandered up Broadway, which
was swarming with hogs."

His step-father's brother-in-law kept an oyster bar, and he at once put
the boy to work learning to open oysters, attending to customers, and
keeping the place clean. The work and the surroundings were rough, and
Stoddard was so manifestly unfitted for his work that he was finally taken
away from the bar and sent into the streets to sell matches. After a few
months of this he was placed in a cheap second-hand clothing store, but
here his earnings were not sufficient to