To Catch a Rake Read Online Free PDF

door. “A decidedly salient and well-timed observation.” He opened the door.
    “I say, sir, this is rather splendid,” Fitzy said, from the back of the room. He held up a large diagram of a tunnel, showing little men shoveling dirt deep inside, but a hundred feet directly above them flowed a broad river. A large schooner seemed suspended in watery air above the men in the tunnel toiling below.
    Mr. Drexel ignored the ladies and moved to the back of the parlor to join Fitzy. “I’m pleased to hear someone say that. This drawing took sixteen days to finish. Do you know what it represents?”
    “A tunnel or shaft of some nature. Are they digging for coal, sir?”
    “Please,” he said with excitement, “any man who admires the skills of an engineer is a friend and can call me Drexel.” He pointed to a double row of tunnels, side by side, with vaulted roofs of elegant brickwork. “This is a diagram of the new Thames Tunnel.”
    Meta moved to admire the drawing too.
    He held it up to catch the meager light of an overcast day coming from the bow window, so they both could view it properly. “The Thames Tunnel is expected to provide an inexpensive way to cross the river. Mr. Marc Brunel, Esq. is the main inventor and engineer, while I work as a junior engineer. I also have taken my father’s seat on the tunnel’s board. I cannot wait to see the tunnel completed; it will be the eighth wonder of the world. Many foreign newspapers already describe our endeavors in great detail. Imagine it, a great tunnel under a navigable river. Not merely a coal tunnel under a stream, but pedestrians and carriages traveling just feet under the massive ships floating on the Thames. It will be a first, of course, and proudly constructed by Englishmen in England’s greatest city.”
    Watching him talk about his beloved tunnel, Meta marveled at the man standing next to her. His dark eyes lit with excitement and the barely veiled sarcasm and bad temper vanished. He transformed into an amiable, enthusiastic gentleman of some intellectual significance, a man to admire and respect.
    Fitzy’s fine blue eyes widened. “I have never heard of it. How far away from completion is the tunnel, sir?”
    Meta spoke to her brother. “So newspapers do have some use.”
    Fitzy wrinkled his nose.
    Mr. Drexel’s excitement about the tunnel continued. “We have only just started the assembly of the shield, a scaffold that will allow the miners to dig the proposed tunnel. With the current difficulty of obtaining funds, due to many of our subscribers losing money in the recent incident of reckless speculation, we are proceeding at a slower pace than initially planned. But we hope to start the lateral digging under the Thames in a fortnight.”
    She tried to remember what she heard about a previous attempt to dig a tunnel, in order to ease the traffic on London’s overcrowded bridges. “Wasn’t a tunnel under the Thames attempted before that suffered numerous leaks until it closed? Surely this failure proved the futility of such an endeavor?”
    “Yes, but that tunnel was poorly built; it was too small and collapsed due to engineering incompetence. We plan to shore up the walls with brickwork immediately after the men remove the dirt from in front of the frames.”
    Admiring his skills as a draftsman and speaker, Meta readily absorbed his enthusiasm. “What are the frames?”
    “Mr. Brunel came up with the idea of frames when he watched a shipworm bore through English oak. After he examined the creature’s head under a lens, he came up with the new idea of boring through dirt using a giant shield made of twelve frames. Each frame resembles a ladder with three men standing on it, one above the other. Think of the shield as the giant head of a mole tunneling through earth. The miners dig out four inches of dirt in front of them and then place a poling board against the dirt. When all of the dirt is removed from the face, they move their frame forward.