Page:The museum, (Jackson, Marget Talbot, 1917).djvu/28

10 piers is almost as great as it would be were the building located in mid-stream. Again, the smoke from the engines of the canal boats makes on some days so dense a cloud that the windows of the museum are darkened by it, while the presence of the water elicits the complaint from the engineer in charge of the ventilating apparatus that he is unable adequately to control the humidity because of the amount of water in the immediate vicinity of the museum! But this is not the worst evil. Permission was granted to build, directly behind the museum, the elevated tracks which were to carry express trains from Petrograd to Paris through the city instead of around it. On these same tracks run suburban trains at frequent intervals. This means that several times a day enormously heavy trains with many cars go jolting by, and every five minutes a suburban train, puffing volumes of smoke, pants on its way. The vibration from this road has caused such cracks in the walls of the museum that in a desperate effort to remedy matters many thousands of dollars were spent in digging a trench ten metres deep and ten metres broad. In this trench concrete retaining walls were built and the middle space was filled with rough stone loosely put in to interrupt the vibratory waves. One would have thought that when everyone recognized that such a mistake had