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cities like London. But instead of using the gain to crowd more and more people into the same area, as Americans have done in all their big towns, Dubliners were wisely laying down floral parks and handsome tree-lined avenues.
    All this was surprising enough, but what astonished me more than I cared to admit was the news that it was still less than a year since the whole rebuilding plan was first put into operation. In about ten months almost the whole of the city north of the river had been reconstructed. I resolved to discover something of the methods that were being used, which plainly must be of a novel kind.
    This little project proved maddeningly difficult. It was tolerably easy to get into buildings that were nearing completion, and very interesting they proved to be. I spent many hours engrossed in the details of internal layout, lighting, soundproofing of apartments and so forth. But try as I would, I couldn’t get anywhere near the early stages of any construction. Every new structure was invariably cordoned off, not just in the immediate vicinity of the building itself, but over an extensive area around it.
    It would have been easy of course to break through one of these cordons and to get past the guards. Such irresponsibility was not to be thought of, however. Already I was attracting some degree of attention. A fellow, whom I took to be a detective or security officer, seemed to have a knack of turning up wherever I happened to be. In itself this appeared to be a good sign rather than a bad one. For the man was not at all skillful. He was perhaps just about right for keeping an eye on an inquisitive student, but no counterespionage service would have employed him on a mission of importance. Even so, I refused to take any unnecessary risk, since it would be absurd to run foul of the authorities over some comparatively trifling incident.
    In any case it needed very little to give one the key to the problem. I think it was on the third morning, in the neighborhood of what had once been Winetavern Street, that I caught a glimpse in the distance of a huge mountainous object that seemed to move. At first I thought that my eyes must be at fault, but thinking over the matter afterward I saw the sense of it. I was to see many such moving mountains later on, so I will say no more at present about this particular oddity, except to add that it convinced me of the stupidity of trying to keep the whole business secret. If a casual visitor could ferret the matter out in three or four days, what was the sense of it? The Irish were now making the same silly mistake that the rest of the world had been making for fifty years past. It is notorious how the governments of Britain, the U.S.S.R., the U.S.A. and France sat on scientific secrets, the same so-called secrets, of course, each under the impression that they were unknown to the others. A lot of broody old hens.
    One particular building occupied my attention very closely, the new Central Rail Station. By all normal standards this edifice was a sheer impossibility. It was built according to an elegant, bold plan with immensely long horizontal arms of unsupported metal. Even to the most casual eye these arms should have broken instantly under, the weight they were required to bear.
    I made the best estimates I could of lengths, widths and so on. Then in the evening I looked up the elementary theory of stress and strain—I am ashamed to say I had forgotten it—in Trinity Library. It took an hour or two to clarify my ideas and to seek out the appropriate physical constants—I believe I used the old Smithsonian Tables. But the result was worth the trouble, for the eye had not been deceived. The metal arms in the Central Station were carrying a transverse stress roughly a hundred times greater than they should have done.
    More accurately, they were bearing a transverse stress roughly a hundred times greater than a similar piece of metal would have carried anywhere outside