enough--was glad, I think, to talk a little and let the phonograph rest.
It must be rather lonely, after all, watching for wrecks hour after
hour, night after night, listening always for footsteps (the officer's
tramp or the thug's stealthy tread), listening always to the hoot of
passing vessels, listening always for bad news.

He explained to me what happens when the bad news comes, say a collision
up the Hudson, a ferry-boat on fire down the bay, a line of barges sunk
in the Sound, any one of a dozen ordinary disasters. In olden times such
tidings must have traveled from mouth to mouth, and the wreckers of
those days flashed their calls and warnings with beacon-fires. Now
electricity does all this much better with the click of a key; and
presently somebody, somewhere, has the office at the end of a wire
telling what the trouble is, and forthwith the man in charge puts
machinery in motion that will change this trouble into cash. _Br-r-r-r_
calls the telephone; up spring messenger-boys in distant all-night
stations, and in half an hour door-bells are ringing in Harlem or Jersey
City, and the men who ought to know things know them, and whistles are
sounding on big pontoons that can lift two hundred tons, and sleepy men
are tumbling out of their bunks, and great chains are clanking, and
tug-boats are sputtering forth for the towing of sundry hoisting-and
pumping-craft that go splashing along to the danger-spot with all
appliances aboard, pneumatic, hydraulic, not to mention savory hot
coffee served to the divers and the crew.

Most divers are poor story-tellers (perhaps because the marvelous grows
commonplace to them from over-indulgence in it), but the stories are
there in their lives, if only you can dig them out. I asked Bean if he
often went down himself, and found that he was still in active service,
after twenty-odd years of it, which certainly had agreed with him. He
was just back from a sad errand in Pennsylvania. A boy had gone swimming
in a slate-quarry, and been drowned; they had dragged for him, and fired
cannon over the water, but nothing had availed, and so, finally, a diver
was sent for from the city, the diver being Bean. The quarry was a great
chasm four or five hundred feet deep, with eighty feet of water filling
various galleries and rock shelves, in one of which the poor lad had
been caught and held. The question was in which one.

"Well," said Bean, coming abruptly to the end, "I went down and got