reland. At the same
time he seized the life-line and air-tube, and tugged at both, not four
times, but nigh forty times four, and never ceased to tug until he found
himself gasping on the deck of the barge with his helmet off and his
comrades laughing round him.

"It's not a bad beginning," said Baldwin, as he assisted his pupil to
unrobe; "you'll make a good diver in course o' time."

Baldwin was right in this prophecy, for in a few months Rooney Machowl
became one of the best and coolest divers on his staff.

We need not try the reader's patience with an account of Edgar's
descent, which immediately followed that of the Irishman. Let it
suffice to say that he too accomplished, with credit and with less
demonstration, his first descent to the bottom of the sea.

CHAPTER THREE.

REFERS TO A SMALL TEA-PARTY, AND TOUCHES VERY MILDLY ON LOVE.

Miss Pritty was a good soul, but weak. She was Edgar Berrington's
maiden aunt--of an uncertain age--on the mother's side. Her chief
characteristic was delicacy--delicacy of health, delicacy of sentiment,
delicacy of intellect--general delicacy, in fact, all over. She was
slight too--slightly made, slightly educated, slightly pretty, and
slightly cracked. But there were a few things in regard to which Miss
Laura Pritty was strong. She was strong in her affections, strong in
her reverence for all good things (including a few bad things which in
her innocence she thought good), strong in her prejudices and impulses,
and strong--remarkably strong--in parentheses. Her speech was eminently
parenthetical, insomuch that the range of her ideas was wholly
untrammelled by the proprieties of subject or language. Given a point
to be aimed at in conversation, Miss Pritty _never_ aimed at it. She
invariably began with it, and, parting finally from it at the outset,
diverged to any or every other point in nature. Perplexity, as a matter
of course, was the usual result both in speaker and hearer, but then
that mattered little, for Miss Pritty was also strong in easy-going
good-nature.

On the evening in which we introduce her, Miss Pritty was going to have
her dear and intimate friend Aileen Hazlit to tea, and she laid out her
little tea-table with as much care as an engineer might have taken in
drawing a mathematical problem. The teapot was placed in the exact
centre of the tray, with its spout and handle pointing so that a line
drawn through them would have been parallel to