make
myself a rich man, and got made a god instead. I've got my feelings----

"It ain't all jam being a god," said the sunburnt man, and for some time
conversed by means of such pithy but unprogressive axioms. At last 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. 'Jimmy 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 s