ast he
took up his tale again.

"There was me," said the sunburnt man, "and a seaman named Jacobs, and
Always, the mate of the Ocean Pioneer. And him it was that set the
whole thing going. I remember him now, when we was in the jolly-boat,
suggesting it all to our minds just by one sentence. He was a wonderful
hand at suggesting things. 'There was forty thousand pounds,' he said,
'on that ship, and it's for me to say just where she went down.' It
didn't need much brains to tumble to that. And he was the leader from
the first to the last. He got hold of the Sanderses and their brig; they
were brothers, and the brig was the Pride of Banya, and he it was bought
the diving-dress--a second-hand one with a compressed air apparatus
instead of pumping. He'd have done the diving too, if it hadn't made him
sick going down. And the salvage people were mucking about with a chart
he'd cooked up, as solemn as could be, at Starr Race, a hundred and
twenty miles away.

"I can tell you we was a happy lot aboard that brig, jokes and drink
and bright hopes all the time. It all seemed so neat and clean and
straightforward, and what rough chaps call a 'cert.' And we used to
speculate how the other blessed lot, the proper salvagers, who'd started
two days before us, were getting on, until our sides fairly ached. We
all messed together in the Sanderses' cabin--it was a curious crew, all
officers and no men--and there stood the diving-dress waiting its turn.
Young Sanders was a humorous sort of chap, and there certainly was
something funny in the confounded thing's great fat head and its stare,
and he made us see it too. 'Jimmie Goggles,' he used to call it, and
talk to it like a Christian. Asked if he was married, and how Mrs.
Goggles was, and all the little Goggleses. Fit to make you split. And
every blessed day all of us used to drink the health of Jimmy Goggles in
rum, and unscrew his eye and pour a glass of rum in him, until, instead
of that nasty mackintosheriness, he smelt as nice in his inside as
a cask of rum. It was jolly times we had in those days, I can tell
you--little suspecting, poor chaps! what was a-coming.

"We weren't going to throw away our chances by any blessed hurry, you
know, and we spent a whole day sounding our way towards where the Ocean
Pioneer had gone down, right between two chunks of ropy grey rock--lava
rocks that rose nearly out of the water. We had to lay off about half a
mile to get a safe anchorage, and t