_, I should
explain, was originally a mud-scow, but for good conduct and an injury
to her nose had been changed into a steam-pump. She could suck her forty
tons of coal an hour out of a wreck with the best of them. And she
traveled with four pontoons, no one of which could touch her in table
fare, especially coffee.

Late one afternoon, when the rain was drizzling and the swinging brass
lamps lit, we sat about on wooden stools (and some were curled up in
bunks along the walls) and listened to the talk of Atkinson and Timmans
and Hansen, who had seen and done strange things in their time.

They were discussing the escape-valve in a diver's helmet, and arguing
whether it pays to stiffen the spring for very deep diving. Atkinson,
who had worked eight fathoms deeper than either of them, said he left
his spring alone; he used the same suit and the same valve action for
any depth.

"But I look out for sand-banks," said he, "ever since that fellow--you
know who I mean--had one cave in on him in the North River. He was
tunneling under a vessel with a wall of sand beside him higher than his
head, and the first thing he knew he was flat on his back, with sand
jammed in his valve so it couldn't open. It wasn't a minute before he
was shot up to the surface like a balloon. The reason of that," he
explained for my benefit, "is because a diving-suit with its valve shut
gets lighter and lighter as they drive down air from the air-pump, until
all of a sudden it comes up, man and all, just as a plank would if you
held it on the bottom and then let it go."

[Illustration: THE MAN WHO ATTENDS TO THE DIVER'S SIGNALS.]

"Talking about planks coming up," said Timmans, who was seated under the
picture of a prize-fighter, "I was down on the North German Lloyd
steamer _Main_, the one that was burned and sunk, fixing a suction-pipe
to pump grain out of her, when a big wooden hatch got loose and came up
under me. I was working between decks, and the hatch swung me right up
against the overhead beams and held me there, squeezing the life-line
and hose so tight I couldn't signal. It's lucky the hose was wire wound,
or that would have been the last of me. But I got my air all right, and
after a while I worked free."

"Wire wound and all," observed Atkinson, "I've had my hose squeezed so
the air was shut off. I was on a wreck off one of the Hoboken docks
once, when an eight-inch suction-pipe caught the hose coming down
through a hatch, and the