It was an appalling task, for the course was through shifting sand, mud, and rock, and before it was completed it was necessary to make more than nine thousand blasts. All these were in the tunnel direct, under the mud and sand and fifty or sixty feet of river water. Yet the undertaking resulted in few accidents, for Jacobs knew how to take care of his men, and he has established a reputation for never sending one where he will not go himself. In his early days of wandering in India, China, and Australia he had learned how to accomplish much by simple means. It was simply learning to do what he called the obvious thing. But the simple, little, obvious thing is often the hardest for most people, including engineers, to see. How He Met an Emergency. In the building of one of the trolley tunnels under the Hudson, a careless opening of the doors of the shield--the cylindrical cup pushed along at the head of the bore, and by means of which all the digging is done--caused the flooding of one hundred feet of the tunnel. It would be as hopeless a task to try to bail that mixture of mud and water out as it would be to drain the Hudson River and the bay adjacent thereto. Jacobs saved the situation by a very simple expedient. 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."