Modern science tells us that earth tremblings are with us at all times and in all places to an extent not realised. We are assured that, by Professor J. Milne’s instruments, quiverings, and slopings of the earth’s crust, insensible to the most delicate spirit-levels, can be detected. It is now known that earthquake movements can be felt right through the earth, and all round its surface. Latterly, Professor Milne has also discovered that his observatory in the Isle of Wight sinks slowly during a part of the year, and rises as slowly during another part--as if the breast of the earth were heaving. For five months in the year, the tall buildings in a city may be heeling over towards the west; then they come back with extreme slowness to the perpendicular, and finally cant a little to the east. Surely, then, we need not complain about an occasional mild earth-shake produced by the passing of the useful Underground, or Tube trains, seeing that the good they do so far outweighs their defects. CHAPTER VIII _TOURING IN THE TUBES_ A SKETCH “She doth stray about.”--SHAKESPEARE. Mrs. Rosamond was a pleasant, chatty, little woman, and a universal favourite. Her abundant hair was brown, her eyes, shaded by long dark lashes, were deepest blue, and above them rose, not the “bar of Michael Angelo,” but a low, smooth, and pretty forehead, where, however, a phrenologist would have looked in vain for the faintest trace of the “bump of locality.” She was a shrewd judge of character in men and women, especially the former. She loved beautiful scenery and everything refined in art and literature. She had great sympathy with the suffering and distressed; but her ability to take mental notes of things and places, and to find her way about towns and cities, as some do by instinct, was utterly wanting in Lilian Rosamond; yet, with the strange perversity that impels people with bad eyesight to drive dog-carts or motor-cars, or to steer yachts, she persisted in going about strange localities unaccompanied, and when any expedition was planned, audaciously posed as an authority on quickest and best routes. But she was a native of the fair “North countree,” and, lying _perdu_ beneath her sweet disposition, was a vein--a thin one--of self-will.