den,
which was still not built upon and unchanged, except for a couple of
advertisement boards, one recommending a two-and-sixpenny watch, and one
a nerve restorer. These, by the bye, were placed almost horizontally to
catch the eye of the passing mono-rail passengers above, and so served
admirably to roof over a tool-shed and a mushroom-shed for Tom. All day
and all night the fast cars from Brighton and Hastings went murmuring by
overhead long, broad, comfortable-looking cars, that were brightly lit
after dusk. As they flew by at night, transient flares of light and a
rumbling sound of passage, they kept up a perpetual summer lightning and
thunderstorm in the street below.

Presently the English Channel was bridged--a series of great iron Eiffel
Tower pillars carrying mono-rail cables at a height of a hundred and
fifty feet above the water, except near the middle, where they rose
higher to allow the passage of the London and Antwerp shipping and the
Hamburg-America liners.

Then heavy motor-cars began to run about on only a couple of wheels, one
behind the other, which for some reason upset Tom dreadfully, and made
him gloomy for days after the first one passed the shop...

All this gyroscopic and mono-rail development naturally absorbed a
vast amount of public attention, and there was also a huge excitement
consequent upon the amazing gold discoveries off the coast of Anglesea
made by a submarine prospector, Miss Patricia Giddy. She had taken her
degree in geology and mineralogy in the University of London, and while
working upon the auriferous rocks of North Wales, after a brief holiday
spent in agitating for women's suffrage, she had been struck by the
possibility of these reefs cropping up again under the water. She had
set herself to verify this supposition by the use of the submarine
crawler invented by Doctor Alberto Cassini. By a happy mingling of
reasoning and intuition peculiar to her sex she found gold at her
first descent, and emerged after three hours' submersion with about two
hundredweight of ore containing gold in the unparalleled quantity
of seventeen ounces to the ton. But the whole story of her submarine
mining, intensely interesting as it is, must be told at some other time;
suffice it now to remark simply that it was during the consequent great
rise of prices, confidence, and enterprise that the revival of interest
in flying occurred.

It is curious how that revival began. It was like the comin