Mr. Martin wasn't to be caught napping, and he was on hand when the herd approached. The man in charge offered to pay for crossing, but Mr. Martin said there was no charge for elephants, and that the man could take them over at his own risk. Mr. Martin stipulated that the elephants should be kept at regular intervals. But when the animals got out on the roadway, a train passing over frightened them, and, with Jumbo to lead them, they gathered in a group and trumpeted fiercely. Finally the keepers got them to go on, but they were so timid that they crowded each other all the way over. Mr. Martin ran out to the centre to watch the effect on the slip joint, and found that the weight amounted to nothing. Ever since that day elephants by the hundred would not cause the bridge officials any concern. Mr. Barnum's elephants got over in safety, but there was no Jumbo advertisement to be had out of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Chief Engineer Martin of the bridge once said to me, when I asked him if he could not tell me some of the interesting things about it that usually escaped the ordinary observer:
"There isn't much to be said. The bridge is a very prosaic thing."
I have no doubt it is to Mr. Martin. He concerns himself with abstract mathematical formulas a good deal. He knows about the tangents and sines and cosines and curves and strains and all that, which some of us grown-up people studied about in college, and have been glad to forget in our humdrum lives since. When I asked Mr. Martin, however, if he knew where Cobweb Lane was, he smiled, and said he didn't. He showed in that way that the bridge was a very prosaic thing to him; but I am sure that if you take no thought of mathematics, and look for the beautiful and interesting things about the bridge, you will be convinced that the bridge is not prosaic after all. A visit to Cobweb Lane will prove it.
THE WESTBRIDGE BURGLAR ALARM.
BY WILLIAM DRYSDALE.
"I wonder we didn't think of it long ago. Why, we can sit in our rooms and talk to each other as well as if we were together. The whole outfit won't cost us more than fifteen dollars."
Tom Dailey began to drum telegraphic dots and dashes on the table with the ends of his fingers. He had just unfolded to his two particular chums his plan of connecting all their houses with a telegraph line, and the boys agreed that a telegraph line was precisely the thing they needed.
"I'm ready to begin right away," said Harry Barker. "The sooner we have it working, the better."