it not be possible, Roland," Margaret said, earnestly, "that
we shall ever look down into the earth together? When the light gets
beyond the depth to which people have dug and bored, I shall never want
to stand there alone behind the screen and see what next shall show
itself."

"That screen is an awkward affair," said Roland. "Perhaps I may think
of a method by which it can be done away with, and by which we can stand
side by side and look down as far into the depths of the earth as our
Artesian ray can be induced to bore."

CHAPTER X. "LAKE SHIVER"

Steadily the Dipsey worked her way northward, and as she moved on her
course her progress became somewhat slower than it had been at first.
This decrease in speed was due partially to extreme caution on the part
of Mr. Gibbs, the Master Electrician.

The attenuated cable, which continually stretched itself out behind the
little vessel, was of the most recent and improved pattern for deep-sea
cables. The conducting wires in the centre of it were scarcely thicker
than hairs, while the wires forming the surrounding envelope, although
they were so small as to make the whole cable not more than an eighth of
an inch in diameter, were far stronger than the thick submarine cables
which were used in the early days of ocean telegraphy. These outer wires
were made of the Swedish toughened steel fibre, and in 1939, with one of
them a little over a sixteenth of an inch in diameter, a freight-ship of
eleven thousand tons had been towed through the Great New Jersey Canal,
which had then just been opened, and which connected Philadelphia with
the ocean.

But notwithstanding his faith in the strength of the cable, Mr. Gibbs
felt more and more, the farther he progressed from the habitable world,
the importance of preserving it from accident. He had gone so far that
it would be a grievous thing to be obliged to turn back.

The Dipsey sailed at a much lower depth than when she had first started
upon her submarine way. After they had become accustomed to the feeling
of being surrounded by water, her inmates seemed to feel a greater
sense of security when they were well down below all possible disturbing
influence. When they looked forward in the line of the search-light, or
through any of the windows in various parts of the vessel, they never
saw anything but water--no fish, nothing floating. They were too far
below the ice above them to see it, and too far from what might be on