hop did the long Alpine valley become. Yet, curiously
enough, instead of destroying romance, this gave a certain majestic
romance of its own; the romance of man's struggle to conquer the
stupendous forces of Nature with his science. It was as if Vulcan's
stithy had been dropped down into a profound ravine of the Alps, and
the drone of machinery mingled with the music of the fleeting river--a
strange diapason.

On the right of the highroad, the flat mountain face opened a black,
egg-shaped mouth at me. I got out of the carriage to approach it, and
while I stood peering down the dark throat, as if I were a Lilliputian
doctor examining the tongue of Giant Gulliver, I was suddenly clapped
upon the shoulder. It flashed into my mind that perhaps it was
forbidden to stare at the tunnel-in-making; and turning to defend
myself from a lash of red tape, with the adage that "a cat may look at
a king," I saw a man I had known years ago smiling at me.

[Illustration: "I WAS SUDDENLY CLAPPED UPON THE SHOULDER".]

I have a worldly-minded cousin who says that she is always nice to
girls, because "you never know whom they may marry." It might be
equally diplomatic to be nice to foreigners who are at Oxford with
you, because you don't know that they may not become famous engineers,
able to show you interesting things when you visit their country.
Giovanni Bolzano had been at Balliol with me, studying English, and
now it turned out that he was second engineer to the works for the new
tunnel. I recalled with poignant regret that Jack Winston and I had
once made hay of his room; but evidently he bore no malice, for after
saying that he was not surprised to see me, as everybody came this way
sooner or later, he offered to show me his tunnel, of which this was
the Italian mouth. It had another at Brig, twelve miles away, and
boasted the longest throat in the world, but as it was marvellously
ventilated, it would never choke in its own smoke, and Bolzano was
very proud of the engineering achievement. Having discharged my
carriage, I went with him into a workshop, heard the humming of
dynamos, and the buzzing of tremendous turbines, actuated by the fall
of the river Diveria, and gazed with the fascination of a mouse for a
cat at a huge and diabolical fan, driving air into the tunnel. This
fearful beast had a house to itself, with a passage down which you
could venture like Theseus entering the labyrinth of the Minotaur; but
such was the volum