at the extreme end, the divers
toiling unseen on the foundation. On a platform of loose planks, the
assistants turned their air-mills; a stone might be swinging between
wind and water; underneath the swell ran gaily; and from time to time, a
mailed dragon with a window-glass snout came dripping up the ladder.
Youth is a blessed season after all; my stay at Wick was in the year of
"Voces Fidelium" and the rose-leaf room at Bailie Brown's; and already I
did not care two straws for literary glory. Posthumous ambition perhaps
requires an atmosphere of roses; and the more rugged excitant of Wick
east winds had made another boy of me. To go down in the diving-dress,
that was my absorbing fancy; and with the countenance of a certain
handsome scamp of a diver, Bob Bain by name, I gratified the whim.

It was grey, harsh, easterly weather, the swell ran pretty high, and out
in the open there were "skipper's daughters," when I found myself at
last on the diver's platform, twenty pounds of lead upon each foot and
my whole person swollen with ply and ply of woollen underclothing. One
moment, the salt wind was whistling round my night-capped head; the
next, I was crushed almost double under the weight of the helmet. As
that intolerable burthen was laid upon me, I could have found it in my
heart (only for shame's sake) to cry off from the whole enterprise. But
it was too late. The attendants began to turn the hurdy-gurdy, and the
air to whistle through the tube; some one screwed in the barred window
of the vizor; and I was cut off in a moment from my fellow-men; standing
there in their midst, but quite divorced from intercourse: a creature
deaf and dumb, pathetically looking forth upon them from a climate of
his own. Except that I could move and feel, I was like a man fallen in a
catalepsy. But time was scarce given me to realise my isolation; the
weights were hung upon my back and breast, the signal-rope was thrust
into my unresisting hand; and setting a twenty-pound foot upon the
ladder, I began ponderously to descend.

Some twenty rounds below the platform, twilight fell. Looking up, I saw
a low green heaven mottled with vanishing bells of white; looking
around, except for the weedy spokes and shafts of the ladder, nothing
but a green gloaming, somewhat opaque but very restful and delicious.
Thirty rounds lower, I stepped off on the _pierres perdues_ of the
foundation; a dumb helmeted figure took me by the hand, and made a
gestur