e (as I read it) of encouragement; and looking in at the
creature's window, I beheld the face of Bain. There we were, hand to
hand and (when it pleased us) eye to eye; and either might have burst
himself with shouting, and not a whisper come to his companion's
hearing. Each, in his own little world of air, stood incommunicably
separate.

Bob had told me ere this a little tale, a five minutes' drama at the
bottom of the sea, which at that moment possibly shot across my mind. He
was down with another, settling a stone of the sea-wall. They had it
well adjusted, Bob gave the signal, the scissors were slipped, the stone
set home; and it was time to turn to something else. But still his
companion remained bowed over the block like a mourner on a tomb, or
only raised himself to make absurd contortions and mysterious signs
unknown to the vocabulary of the diver. There, then, these two stood for
a while, like the dead and the living; till there flashed a fortunate
thought into Bob's mind, and he stooped, peered through the window of
that other world, and beheld the face of its inhabitant wet with
streaming tears. Ah! the man was in pain! And Bob, glancing downward,
saw what was the trouble: the block had been lowered on the foot of that
unfortunate--he was caught alive at the bottom of the sea under fifteen
tons of rock.

That two men should handle a stone so heavy, even swinging in the
scissors, may appear strange to the inexpert. These must bear in mind
the great density of the water of the sea, and the surprising results of
transplantation to that medium. To understand a little what these are,
and how a man's weight, so far from being an encumbrance, is the very
ground of his agility, was the chief lesson of my submarine experience.
The knowledge came upon me by degrees. As I began to go forward with the
hand of my estranged companion, a world of tumbled stones was visible,
pillared with the weedy uprights of the staging: overhead, a flat roof
of green: a little in front, the sea-wall, like an unfinished rampart.
And presently in our upward progress, Bob motioned me to leap upon a
stone; I looked to see if he were possibly in earnest, and he only
signed to me the more imperiously. Now the block stood six feet high; it
would have been quite a leap to me unencumbered; with the breast and
back weights, and the twenty pounds upon each foot, and the staggering
load of the helmet, the thing was out of reason. I laughed aloud in m