him."

That was his way of telling the story: he "went down and got him." There
was nothing more to say; nothing about the two days' perilous search
through every tunnel and recess of those rocky walls; nothing about the
three thousand excited people who crowded around the quarry's mouth,
awaiting the issue, nor the scene when that pitiful burden was hauled up
from the depths.

I asked Bean if he had ever been in great danger while under the water.

"Nothing special," he said, and then added, after thinking: "Once I had
my helmet twisted off."

[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF A DIVER. DRAWN FROM LIFE.]

"What, below?"

He nodded.

"How can a diver live with his helmet off?"

"He can't, usually. 'T was just luck they got me up in time. They say my
face was black as a coal." And he had no more to tell of this adventure.

With few exceptions, divers take their career in exactly this
phlegmatic, matter-of-fact way. I fancy a man of vivid imagination would
break under the strain of such a life. Yet often divers will go into
great details about some little incident, as when Bean described the
hoisting of a certain boiler sunk outside of Sandy Hook. It had been on
a tug-boat of such a name, it was so many feet long and wide, and other
things about the tide and the steam-derrick, and what the captain said,
the point being that this boiler had acted as an enormous trap for the
blackfish, of which they had found some hundreds of big ones splashing
about inside, unable to escape.

So our talk ran on, and all the time I was thinking how I would like to
see these things for myself. And it came to pass, as the subject kept
its hold on me, that I did see them. Indeed, I spent a whole summer
month--and found zest in it beyond ordinary summer pleasurings--in
observing the practical operations of diving and wrecking as they go on
in the waters about New York. I discovered other wrecking companies,
notably one on West Street, and from the head man here learned many
things. He took me out on a pier one day, where one of his crews was
rescuing thirty thousand dollars' worth of copper buried under the North
River. Every few minutes, with a _chunk-chunk_ of the engine and a
rattle of chains, the dredge would bring up a fistful of mud (an iron
fist, holding a ton or so) and slap it down on the deck, where a strong
hose-stream would wash out little canvas bags of copper ore, each worth
a ten-dollar bill in the market.

"This will show