The story of the mine, no doubt, presents some difficulties which, though by no means insuperable, cannot be solved with absolute certainty without more information than we possess at present. We may, I think, dismiss the suggestion of the Edinburgh Reviewer that the conspirators may have dug straight down instead of making a tunnel, both because even bunglers could hardly have occupied a fortnight in digging a pit a few feet deep, and because their words about reaching the wall at the end of the fortnight would, on this hypothesis, have no meaning. Thomas Winter's statement is that he and his comrades 'wrought under a little entry to the wall of the Parliament House.'[156] The little entry, as I have already argued,[157] must be the covered passage under the withdrawing room; a tunnel leading from the cellar of Percy's house would be about seven or eight feet long. The main difficulty at the commencement of the work would be to get through the wall of Percy's house, and this, it may be noticed, neither Fawkes nor Winter speak of, though they are very positive as to the difficulties presented by the wall of the House of Lords. If, indeed, the wall on this side of Percy's house was, as may with great probability be conjectured, built of brick, as the river front undoubtedly was,[158] the difficulty cannot have been great, as I have been informed by Mr. Henry Ward[159] that the brick used in those days was, both from its composition and from the method in which it was dried, far softer than that employed in building at present. We may, therefore, fairly start our miners in the cellar of their own house with a soft brick wall to penetrate, and a tunnel afterwards to construct, having wood ready to prop up the earth, and appropriate implements to carry out their undertaking.[160] Here, however, Father Gerard waves us back:-- "It is not easy," he writes, "to understand how these amateurs contrived to do so much without a catastrophe. To make a tunnel through soft earth is a very delicate operation, replete with unknown difficulties. To shore up the roof and sides there must, moreover, have been required a large quantity of the 'framed timber'[161] of which Speed tells us, and the provision and importation of this must have been almost as hard to keep dark as the exportation of the earth and stones. A still more critical operation is that of meddling with the foundations of a house--especially of an old and heavy structure--which a professional craftsman would not venture upon except with extreme care, and the employment of many precautions of which these light-hearted adventurers knew nothing. Yet, recklessly breaking their way out of one building, and to a large extent into another, they appear to have occasioned neither crack nor settlement in either."[162]