"Where is the fly now?" said he. "At his office doing business—"
"I don't understand," said Ned.
"I've only half explained it," said Phaeton. "Now, you see, it's easy enough to make a tunnel under-ground and run cars through. But a tunnel always gets full of smoke when a train goes through, which is very disagreeable, and if you send a train every fifteen minutes, all the passengers would choke. So, you see, there must be something instead of an engine and a train of cars. I propose to dig a good tunnel wherever the road wants to go, and make it as long as you please. Right through the centre I pass an India-rubber cable as large as a man's leg, and stretch it tight and fasten it to great posts at each end. All the men and boys who want to go sit on at one end, as if on horseback. When everything is ready, the train-despatcher takes a sharp axe, and with one blow clips the cable in two behind them, and zip they go to the other end before you can say Jack Robinson."
Ned said he should like to be train-despatcher.
"They'd all have to hang on like time," said I.
"Of course they would," said Phaeton; "but there are little straps for them to take hold by."
"And would there be a tub at the other end," said Ned "to catch the passengers that were broken to pieces against the end wall?"
"Oh, pshaw!" said Phaeton. "Don't you suppose I have provided for that?"
The fact was, Phaeton had spent more study on the question of landing his passengers safely than on any other part of his invention. It was not the first instance since the days of the hand-mill that made the sea salt, in which it had been found easy to set a thing going, but difficult to stop it.
"There are several ways," said he, continuing his explanation, "to let the passengers off safely. I haven't decided yet what I'll adopt. One way is, to have a sort of brake to squeeze down on the cable and make it stop gradually. I don't exactly like that, because it would wear out the cable, and these cables are going to cost a great deal of money. Another way is, to throw them against a big, soft mattress, like pins in a bowling-alley. But even that would hurt a little, I guess, no matter how soft you made the mattress. The best way is, to have it drop them in a tank of water."