pipes
exert in pumping out a vessel. He was working on a wreck off City
Island, at the entrance to the Sound. He had signaled for rags to stuff
up a long crack, and the tender had tied a bundle of them to the
life-line, and lowered it to him by slacking out the line. All this time
the pump was working at full pressure, throwing out streams from the
wreck through four big pipes. Suddenly the life-line came near the
crack, and was instantly drawn into it and jammed fast, so that Hansen
would have been held prisoner by the very rope intended to save him, had
it not been for the slack paid out, which was fortunately long enough
to bring him up. Had it been his hand or foot that was seized in that
sucking clutch, the incident would have had a sadder ending.

[Illustration: "I STAYED DOWN UNTIL THAT CHAIN WAS UNDER THE SHAFT."]

Then came other stories, until the day was fading and the tide was
right, and Atkinson was ready for the grounding of this soaked and
battered tug-boat. Presently he calls "Look out for that rope. Get yer
jacks ready. Now slack away!" And forthwith pulleys are creaking and
great chains are grinding down link by link as the men pump at the
little "jacks" and the forty-foot timbers that stretch across pontoons
and hold the wreck-chains groan on their blocks, and at last the
_America_ comes to rest safely, ingloriously on the mud. Poor
_America_! so proud and saucily tooting only the other day, now a
bedraggled wreck on these Weehawken flats, destined to what fate who
knows? To be lifted from the mud, patched up, rebuilt, quarreled over by
owners and insurance people, or perhaps simply left here, with the
others, for wharf-rats to swarm in and boys to go crabbing on!

The burying-ground of wrecks! What a sight from the rugged height back
of the water! Here are blackened, shapeless hulks from the great river
fire of 1900, when red-hot liners drifted blazing to these very flats.
Here is the ferry-boat _River Bell_, decked with flags in her day, and
danced on by gay excursionists, now thick with mud and slime, her
deck-beams spongy under foot, her wheel-frames twisted like a broken
spider's-web. Here are the half-sunken halves of some ice-barge, cut
clean in two by a liner. Here, heaving with the tide, is an aged
car-float with a watchman's shanty on it, heaped with its rusted
boilers, its anchors, cranes, gear-wheels, cables, pumps, a tangle of
iron things that were once important. Here is a scuttled tug