Like the great trunk-lines, the Central has an annual sale of articles left in the carriages and not claimed; but the collection differs considerably from the miscellaneous assortment brought together by, say, the Great Northern or Great Western. Heavy impedimenta are, as might be expected, absent; but who could have been the owners of the 25 bottles of whisky, the 13 boxes of cigars and cigarettes, the 300 ladies’ umbrellas, and the 264 gentlemen’s umbrellas, the walking-sticks innumerable, the 150 pairs of spectacles and eyeglasses (showing that the light is so good that reading is a favourite way of passing the time), the 44 fur necklets, 920 pairs of gloves and 14 muffs, the 166 empty purses, and the multitude of books, chiefly fiction? While every week someone very mysteriously leaves behind a spirit-bottle--evidently recently emptied of its contents--enclosed in cardboard and done up in a neat parcel. How the Twopenny Tube, and others like it, were constructed will be described in the next chapter. CHAPTER VII _THE TUBULAR SYSTEM_ “Thy arts of building from the bee receive; Learn of the mole to plow, the worm to weave.”--POPE. ORIGIN OF THE SYSTEM Last year there were sounds of strife in that financial atmosphere where dwell Titan capitalists, who think and talk and dream in millions; a battle of giants, like the conflict imagined by Milton, when the satanic host levelled “triple-mounted rows” of deadly tubes with such effect against seraph and seraphim, “that whom they hit none on their feet could stand, though standing else as rocks.” But the conflict now past, concerned tubes of another kind--iron railway tubes, that seem to be the destiny of underground metropolitan travellers. The Morgan group, the Yerkes’ combination, and other great coalitions, mustered their battalions for the fray. The London County Council, following the policy of Lord Stanley’s army at Bosworth field, hovered aloof ready to take advantage of the defeat of either; the Corporation of London anxiously watched from afar; the great suburban railway companies shivered in their shoes; a parental Legislature held the balance impartially between the combatants; while the people whom the matter most concerned--some six millions of Londoners--had to sit down with folded hands and, patiently or impatiently, await their fate. Recollecting this tangle and uproar of conflicting interests, it behoves everybody to have some notion of the subject of the Tubes and their construction.