behaved here because he was homesick for the other Black
Boys, and didn't know how else to get back to them. Well, he has got
them now, and I hope he likes it better than I should.

I read the other day something that I thought would interest so great a
sea-bather as yourself. You know that the fishes that we see, and catch,
go only a certain way down into the sea. Below a certain depth there is
no life at all. The water is as empty as the air is above a certain
height. Even the shells of dead fishes that come down there are crushed
into nothing by the huge weight of the water. Lower still, in the places
where the sea is profoundly deep, it appears that life begins again.
People fish up in dredging-buckets loose rags and tatters of creatures
that hang together all right down there with the great weight holding
them in one, but come all to pieces as they are hauled up. Just what
they look like, just what they do or feed upon, we shall never find out.
Only that we have some flimsy fellow-creatures down in the very bottom
of the deep seas, and cannot get them up except in tatters. It must be
pretty dark where they live, and there are no plants or weeds, and no
fish come down there, or drowned sailors either, from the upper parts,
because these are all mashed to pieces by the great weight long before
they get so far, or else come to a place where perhaps they float. But I
dare say a cannon sometimes comes careering solemnly down, and circling
about like a dead leaf or thistle-down; and then the ragged fellows go
and play about the cannon and tell themselves all kinds of stories about
the fish higher up and their iron houses, and perhaps go inside and
sleep, and perhaps dream of it all like their betters.

Of course you know a cannon down there would be quite light. Even in
shallow water, where men go down with a diving-dress, they grow so light
that they have to hang weights about their necks, and have their boots
loaded with twenty pounds of lead--as I know to my sorrow. And with all
this, and the helmet, which is heavy enough of itself to any one up here
in the thin air, they are carried about like gossamers, and have to take
every kind of care not to be upset and stood upon their heads. I went
down once in the dress, and speak from experience. But if we could get
down for a moment near where the fishes are, we should be in a tight
place. Suppose the water not to crush us (which it would), we should
pitch about in every k