e motionless until he stirred his head, and then they
vanished instantly. Mr. Lake has a remarkable photograph which he
took of a visiting fish, and Wilson tells of nurturing a queer
flat crab for days in the crevice of one of the view-holes.

At that moment, I felt a faint jolt, and Mr. Lake said that we
were on the bottom of the sea.

Here we were running as comfortably along the bottom of Sandy
Hook Bay as we would ride in a Broadway car, and with quite as
much safety. Wilson, who was of a musical turn, was whistling
_Down Went McGinty_, and Mr. Lake, with his hands on the
pilot-wheel, put in an occasional word about his marvellous
invention. On the wall opposite there was a row of dials which
told automatically every fact about our condition that the most
nervous of men could wish to know. One of them shows the pressure
of air in the main compartment of the boat, another registers
vacuum, and when both are at zero, Mr. Lake knows that the
pressure of the air is normal, the same as it is on the surface,
and he tries to maintain it in this condition. There are also a
cyclometer, not unlike those used on bicycles, to show how far
the boat travels on the wheels; a depth gauge, which keeps us
accurately informed as to the depth of the boat in the water, and
a declension indicator. By the long finger of the declension dial
we could tell whether we were going up hill or down. Once while
we were out, there was a sudden, sharp shock, the pointer leaped
back, and then quivered steady again. Mr. Lake said that we had
probably struck a bit of wreckage or an embankment, but the
_Argonaut_ was running so lightly that she had leaped up jauntily
and slid over the obstruction.

We had been keeping our eyes on the depth dial, the most
fascinating and interesting of any of the number. It showed that
we were going down, down, down, literally down to the sea in a
ship. When we had been submerged far more than an hour, and there
was thirty feet of yellowish green ocean over our heads, Mr. Lake
suddenly ordered the machinery stopped. The clacking noises of
the dynamo ceased, and the electric lights blinked out, leaving
us at once in almost absolute darkness and silence. Before this,
we had found it hard to realize that we were on the bottom of the
ocean;