Soon after leaving Port Chester, frequent explosions attracted my attention, and when within two miles of Tarrytown I came to a cluster of cheap shanties out in the woods, and found that it was the location of Shaft No. 11 of the new aqueduct for New York city. This shaft was only sixty feet deep, and as dump cars of rocks were constantly coming up, and empty cars going down, I thought it would be a fine thing to go down into the bowels of the earth. But no amount of entreaty, no amount of newspaper influence behind me would induce the foreman to give his consent without a permit from headquarters, so I rode over to Tarrytown, hunted the city all over, and finally got the coveted piece of paper from D. D. McBeau, the superintendent. I laid awake half the night thinking of the grand chance before me, and started off next morning from Sing Sing to Shaft One, eight miles directly out of my way, over a hilly and muddy country. Here were more cheap shanties off in the mountains and crowds of negroes and Italians loafing around in the woods, waiting for their turn to go down to work. Rum-holes were numerous and doing a thriving business. The powder and oil clerk gave me an old coat and a pair of rubber boots to put on, and when the empty car was ready I crawled over into it and boldly stood up in the mud beside an Italian, who grinned and said something I could not understand. While waiting for the bell to ring I found this hole was 360 feet deep instead of sixty. That information caused me to look over the side of the car down into the dark where the loaded car comes up--the cars go up and down like the buckets in a well--and try to imagine how far down a fellow would go. If anything should break I did not suppose it would jar me much more to drop 360 feet than it would sixty, but it was the uneasy feeling falling during the longer interval that I began to believe I would avoid. What would happen afterwards I never thought of, but it was the long time going down so far before anything could happen that troubled me. I did not want to run the risk of waiting so long. Then I began to think of what they told me before I got into the car, how the day before the cable slipped, a wheel or something dropped--I did not mind much what they said I was so intent on getting into that car--and how the brains of the man beneath were scooped up into a cigar-box and taken away, and how twelve men were sitting on that cigar-box, or all there was of the man's body below his shirt collar, at the same time I was hanging over that black hole. I did not object so much to being carried away in a cigar-box, or being sat upon afterwards, but somehow I did not think it such a big thing to go down after all. I began to imagine how it looked down there, and the more the workmen urged me the less I wanted to go. It wouldn't pay anyhow. I could just as well imagine how it looked and not go. All this time if the