day; a tentative schedule called for one train to traverse it in one direction or another every five minutes or so for twenty hours out of the twenty-four.) Trains coming through the tunnel from France were to emerge into the daylight and the ordinary open air of England either from a four-mile-long access tunnel connected to the South-Eastern's railway line at Abbots Cliff or—this was a favored alternative plan of Sir Edward's—at Shakespeare Cliff via a station to be constructed in a great square excavated a hundred and sixty feet deep in the ground, which would be covered over with glass, lighted by electric light, and equipped "with large waiting rooms and refreshment rooms." From the abyss of this submerged station, trains arriving from the Continent were to be raised, an entire train at a time, to the level of the existing South-Eastern line by a giant hydraulic lift. (Actually, constructing an elevator capable of raising such an enormous load would not seem as unlikely a feat in the eighties as it might to many people now; Victorian engineers were expert in the use of hydraulic power for ship locks and all sorts of other devices, and, in fact, hydraulic power was so commonly used that the London of half a century ago had perhaps eight hundred miles of hydraulic piping laid below the streets to work industrial presses, motors, and most of the cranes on the Thames docks.) As the experimental work progressed, Sir Edward Watkin saw to it that all the splendid details about the Channel-tunnel scheme were constantly brought to the attention of the South-Eastern's shareholders, the press, and the public. Sir Edward, besides being a nineteenth-century railway king, was also something of a twentieth-century public-relations operator. He was a firm believer in the beneficial effects of giving big dinners, a pioneer in the art of organizing big junkets, and an adept at getting plenty of newspaper space. An energetic lobbyist in Parliament for all sorts of causes, not excluding his own commercial projects, he was known as a habitual conferrer of friendly little gestures upon important people in and out of government, and his kindness is said to have gone so far at one time that he provided Mr. Gladstone with the convenience of a private railway branch line that went right to the statesman's country home.