a shrug of her shoulders. "Now,
Joe," she continued, turning to her husband, "you'll begin at once to
look out for a situation above water. David Maxwell can finish the job
you had in hand,--speakin' of that, does any one know where David is
just now?"

"He's down at the bottom of a gasometer," answered Joe; "leastwise he
was there this afternoon--an' a dirty place it is."

"A bad-smellin' job that, I should think," observed Rooney.

"Well, it ain't a sweet-smellin' one," returned Joe. "He's an
adventurous man is David. I don't believe there's any hole of dirty
water or mud on the face o' this earth that he wouldn't go down to the
bottom of if he was dared to it. He's fond of speculatin' too, ever
since that trip to the China seas. You must know, Mrs Rooney, if your
husband hasn't told you already, that we divers, many of us, have our
pet schemes for makin' fortunes, and some of us have tried to come
across the Spanish dubloons that are said to lie on the sea-bottom off
many parts of our coast where the Armada was lost."

"It's jokin' ye are," said Mrs Machowl, looking at Joe with a sly
twinkle in her pretty eyes.

"Jokin'! No, indeed, I ain't," rejoined the diver. "Did Rooney never
tell ye about the Spanish Armada?"

"Och! He's bin sayin' somethin' about it now an' again, but he's such a
man for blarney that I never belave more nor half he says."

"Sure ain't that the very raison I tell ye always at laste twice as much
as I know?" said Rooney, lighting his pipe.

"Well, my dear," continued Joe, "the short an' the long of it is, that
about the year 1588, the Spaniards sent off a huge fleet of big ships to
take Great Britain and Ireland by storm--once for all--and have done
with it, but Providence had work for Britain to do, and sent a series o'
storms that wrecked nearly the whole Spanish fleet on our shores. Many
of these vessels had plenty of gold dubloons on board, so when divin'
bells and dresses were invented, men began to try their hands at fishin'
it up, and, sure enough, some of it was actually found and brought up--
especially off the shores of the island of Mull, in Scotland. They even
went the length of forming companies in this country, and in Holland,
for the purpose of recovering treasure from wrecks. Well, ever since
then, up to the present time, there have been speculative men among
divers, who have kept on tryin' their hands at it. Some have succeeded;
others have failed. David Ma