they tell of one man who
worked in great distress because, when he got down, he found a June-bug
in his helmet, and had to bear the insect's lively promenading over his
features, powerless to stop it. And there was a diver who, in bravado,
used to smoke a cigarette inside his helmet.

Divers, as a class, are not superstitious. Seldom do their thoughts down
below stray into realms of fantasy, nor have they time to dream, but
only to hammer, and saw, and ply the crowbar, and drive iron spikes
twenty inches long into huge timbers--in short, to attend strictly to
their work.

It is amusing to note the scorn of practical divers for the nice
electric-lighting and telephone contrivances of divers who never dive,
but sell their inventions to the Government for its Newport diving
school, which same inventions remain, for the most part, in their
spick-span boxes. It seems simple enough to have submarine lights; yet
divers who dive prefer to grope in the almost darkness of our ordinary
waters. It seems a distinct advantage that diver and tender be able to
talk over a wire; yet divers who dive keep jealously to the clumsy
system of jerks on the lines, and will not even be bothered with the
Morse alphabet. The fact is, a diver has quite as much as he can attend
to with the burden of his suit (about a hundred and seventy-five
pounds), and his two lines to watch and keep from kinks and
entanglements. Touch one of these lines, and you touch his life. Fasten
a new line to him, or two new lines, and you enormously increase his
peril. Imagine yourself stumbling about in a dark forest, with a man
strapped on your back, and several ropes dragging behind you among trees
and rocks, each separate rope being to you as breath and blood! That is
precisely the diver's case. So he goes; so he works. And when they offer
him pretty apparatus to increase his load, he will have none of it. Nor
will he tug any extra ropes. "I have ways enough of dying as it is,"
says he.

Working thus in gloom or darkness, the diver develops his senses of
feeling and locality. He gains certain qualities of blind men, and finds
guidance in unlooked-for ways. The ascending bubbles from his helmet,
for instance, shine silver white and may be seen for a couple of
fathoms. These bubbles have a trick of lodging in a vessel's seams, and
so give the diver a rough pattern of her. Again, in searching for
leaks, the sense of hearing helps him, for he can distinguish (after
lo