Following the crowd, Mrs. Rosamond dropped the document into a sloping box fixed at the side of the gate and presided over by a railway official, the process suggesting to her lively imagination the method by which votes are recorded at a School Board election. Wide open stood the door of a gigantic lift, the like of which she had never seen, which quickly filled with a compact mass of some fifty men and a sprinkling of women. There were upholstered benches at the sides; and a civil young artisan offered her his seat, but Lilian preferred to stand and look about her. The electro-lighted apartment was not æsthetic, and the unsightly advertisements, and notices warning travellers against smoking, spitting, or standing too near the doors, did not add to its beauty; and when the telescopic gates were clashed together and fastened, the whole thing reminded Mrs. Rosamond of a great cage full of specimens of the British _Homo Sapiens_ packed for conveyance and exhibition to inhabitants of other regions. Suddenly, gently, and noiselessly the lift began to descend, and it seemed as if it would never stop. But stop it did, at a depth of seventy feet, which might have been seven hundred so far as Mrs. Rosamond’s sensations were concerned. Once again the iron gates clashed, and the wild animals--I mean the passengers--streamed forth, our fair traveller following, to the platform. Was she dreaming? Had she, like Alice in Wonderland, suddenly become diminutive, and was she waiting for a well-groomed little white rabbit, with gold watch and chain, to emerge from what resembled a burrow at the end of the station? It was so _very_ small. Everything was on a reduced scale, the standing-room was a mere strip of planking, the tube like a pea-shooter. Surely it would not take in the train! However, it was deliciously cool and light, and the tiles that lined the station were, as she found by touching them with her gloved hands, perfectly free from smuts. In a few moments, from the open cutting at the opposite end of the platform, where lay the shunting tracks, a bright light and metallic clattering heralded the strange-looking chimneyless locomotive. Behind it came five attractive-looking cars joined together, and gleaming with light. At their point of junction were telescopic gates, flung open as soon as the train stopped, and Mrs. Rosamond, who had just time to observe that there were not _two_ rails only on the track, but a _third_ in the middle, hurried into the first car she could find, and the earliest train on the Tube glided into the tunnel _en route_ for the Bank. Lilian Rosamond at once discovered that the cars just fitted the Tube. She would like to have touched the sides, but as the windows were sealed up this was impossible.