ime. Just imagine how long it must have taken to
cut out and carry away all the masses of earth that had to be removed to
make a tunnel of such a length--a tunnel which should run right round
underneath London. The most wonderful thing is that the houses under
which it ran did not fall down and break through into it. But that has
never happened, for the men who built the tunnel made it very strong,
and lined it with bricks. And all day long, while people are walking
about in the streets and horses are trotting in the daylight, down below
the trains in the underground are running, running in the dark. It
cannot be a very pleasant life to be an engine-driver on this railway:
it must be almost like the life of a pitman who works down in the depths
of the earth; yet the men themselves seem quite happy. The worst part of
the railway used to be that as there are not many places where the smoke
and steam can get out into the air, they hung in the tunnels and made
the air very thick and bad, and there was, consequently, nearly always a
sort of fog down there, and it was unpleasant to breathe the thick air;
but all this has been remedied now, for the trains are run by
electricity instead of steam. There are other underground railways in
London also run by electricity, and they go through different districts,
so by means of one or the other people can get near to almost any street
where they want to go to visit their friends or to shop. In these, the
fares are on the same system as on other railways: you pay for your
ticket according to the distance you wish to go; but in the first one
you paid twopence for all distances alike--twopence if you wanted to go
right from the West End to the City, and twopence all the same if you
were going to get out at the next station. Therefore some people
nicknamed this railway 'The Twopenny Tube.'

Now, besides these underground trains, which are not seen, there are
many huge motor-omnibuses to convey people about the streets above
ground. These omnibuses are painted in very bright colours--generally
red--and the newest of all are made very conveniently so that the
passengers inside can mostly sit facing the way they are going, as they
do outside. You can go inside or out, and in summer it is a very good
way of seeing London to go on the top of an omnibus and watch all that
goes on in the streets below; in the old days the horse omnibuses were
often stuffy inside, with no windows to open at all,