eaps of things! Old Hare's keen on building a Channel Tunnel, and
he's spent a good deal of time working the thing out!"

Mrs. Graham had always imagined that the proposal to build a Tunnel
between France and England was a joke, and she said so.

"Good heavens, mother!" Ninian exclaimed. "Old Hare isn't a joke. The
thing's as practicable as the Tuppenny Tube. People have been
experimenting for half-a-century with it. Joke, indeed! They've made
seven thousand soundings in forty years!..."

"Really!" said Mrs. Graham.

"And borings, too ... lots of them ... in the bed of the Channel.
They've started a Tunnel, two thousand yards of it from Dover, under the
sea, and there isn't a flaw in it. Hardly any water comes through,
although there isn't a lining to the walls ... just the bare, grey
chalk. I was awfully sick when I was told I couldn't go to Harland and
Wolff's, but I don't mind now. Building a Channel Tunnel is as big a job
as building the _Gigantic_ any day, and Hare is as brainy as Tom
Arthurs!"

He became oratorical about the Channel Tunnel, and he told them stories
of remarkable borings on both sides of the sea.

"There's a big thick bed of grey chalk all the way from England to
France," he said, "and the water simply can't get through it. They've
made experimental tubes from our side and from the French side, and they
let people into them, and it was all right. No mud, no water, no foul
air ... perfectly sound!"

He quoted Sartiaux, the French engineer, and Sir Francis Fox, the
English engineer. "They don't fool about with wildcat schemes, I can
tell you. Why, Fox built the Mersey Tunnel and the Simplon Tunnel ...
and the Channel Tunnel is as easy as that!"

There were to be two tubes, each capable of carrying the ordinary
British railway, bored through a bed of cenomian chalk, two hundred feet
thick on an average.

"We could have an extra tunnel for motor-cars, if necessary!" said
Ninian. "Just think of the difference there'd be if we had the Tunnel.
You could buzz from London to Paris in five or six hours without
changing, and you'd never get seasick!..."

"That would be nice," said Mrs. Graham.

"And you'd be safer in the Tunnel than you'd be on the Channel. There'd
be a hundred and fifty feet of watertight chalk between you and the
sea!"

They argued about the Tunnel. How long would it take to construct? "Oh,
six or seven years!" Ninian answered airily. "What about War? Supposing
England and F