The cup defender Reliance had just been stripped of her canvas, and Jacobs got this big spread of sail, sank it flat over the flooded part of the tunnel, weighted it with a mixture of clay and stone, and thus mended the bottom of the river so that it didn't continue to leak in mud and water. It was so very simple that few people would have thought of it.
He completed his first Hudson tunneling work on the 11th of March, 1905, and all he said when the work was done and he had walked through was:
"There isn't much to tell, except that Henry Hudson was the first man who crossed over the river and Jacobs was the first man who crossed under it."
WAS INSULTED BY POE.
Romantic Life-Story of Poor Boy Who
Heard the Voice of the Muse in
an Iron Foundry.
Richard Henry Stoddard, who won fame as a poet, critic, and journalist, fought his way upward through conditions that would have discouraged most men. His parents were miserably poor and his father died while the boy was still young. His mother was of a restless, wandering disposition, and when Richard was ten years old she left her New England home and brought him to New York. "Here," he says, "we landed at or near the Battery one bright Sunday morning late in the autumn of 1835, and wandered up Broadway, which was swarming with hogs."
His step-father's brother-in-law kept an oyster bar, and he at once put the boy to work learning to open oysters, attending to customers, and keeping the place clean. The work and the surroundings were rough, and Stoddard was so manifestly unfitted for his work that he was finally taken away from the bar and sent into the streets to sell matches. After a few months of this he was placed in a cheap second-hand clothing store, but here his earnings were not sufficient to satisfy his family, and though he was of frail physique his mother apprenticed him to a blacksmith.
"I was put to work at once on the anvil," he says, "and before the day was over my right hand was so blistered that I had to open its fingers with my left hand, and detach them from the handle of the sledge hammer that I wielded."
He was eighteen years old when he was sent to work in an iron foundry, and he remained at this occupation several years, studying and writing incessantly at night. One poem, "Ode on a Grecian Flute," was accepted by the Broadway Journal, a little weekly edited by Edgar Allan Poe. Later the originality of the poem was doubted. Stoddard went to assure Poe that it was original. He found him asleep in an office chair. On being awakened and told by Stoddard that the poem was original, Poe jumped up and yelled:
"You lie! Get out before I throw you out."