es in their mouths,
against the dust and gases, but one man coughed so hard he tore
something in his lungs or head and died. Then they sent for a
diver--that was me--and I worked hours down there hoisting and
shoveling, like I was at the bottom of the bay, only there was no water
to carry the weight. Say, but wasn't that suit heavy, and when I looked
out through my helmet-glasses it seemed as if I was digging through a
snow-field, with such a terrible dazzle it made my eyes ache to look at
it."

"I suppose you don't usually see much under water?" said I.

"Depends on what water it is," answered Timmans.

"All rivers around New York are black as ink twenty feet down," remarked
Atkinson.

"I know they are," said Timmans, "but I've seen different rivers. When I
was diving off the Kennebec's mouth, five miles southeast of the Seguin
light (we were getting up the wreck of the _Mary Lee_), then, gentlemen,
I looked through as beautiful clear water as you could find in a
drug-store filter. Why, it reminded me of the West Indies. I could see
plainly for, well, certainly seventy-five feet over swaying kelp-weed,
eight feet high, with blood-red leaves as big as a barrel, all dotted
over with black spots. There were acres and acres of it, swarming with
rock-crabs and lobsters and all kinds of fish."

"Any sharks?" said I.

Hansen and Atkinson smiled, for this is a question always put to divers,
who usually have to admit that they never even saw a shark. Not so
Timmans.

"I had an experience with a shark," he answered gravely, "but it wasn't
up in Maine. It was while we were trying to save a three-thousand-ton
steamer of the Hamburg-American Packet Company, wrecked on a bar in the
Magdalena River, United States of Colombia. I'd been working for days
patching her keel, hung on a swinging shelf we'd lowered along her side,
and every time I went down I saw swarms of red snappers and butterfish
under my shelf, darting after the refuse I'd scrape off her plates; and
there were big jewfish, too, and I used to harpoon 'em for the men to
eat. In-fact, I about kept our crew supplied with fresh fish that way.
Well, on one particular day I noticed a sudden shadow against the light,
and there was a shark sure enough; not such an enormous one, but twelve
feet long anyhow--big enough to make me uneasy. He swam slowly around
me, and then kept perfectly still, looking straight at me with his
little wicked eyes. I didn't know what minute h