Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 23, February, 1873

And the hooting and the yells of the gladdened, maddened people.
Some they rode and some they ran by the wagon where it rumbled,
Scoffing at the lifeless man, all elate that death had humbled
Jack, the Regular.

Thus within the winter night, when the hickory fire is roaring,
Flickering streams of ruddy light on the folk before it pouring—
When the apples pass around, and the cider follows after,
And the well-worn jest is crowned by the hearers' hearty laughter—
When the cat is purring there, and the dog beside her dozing,
And within his easy-chair sits the grandsire old, reposing,—
Then they tell the story true to the children, hushed and eager,
the two Van Valens slew, on a time, the Tory leaguer,
Jack, the Regular.

    THOMAS DUNN ENGLISH.

OBSERVATIONS AND ADVENTURES IN SUBMARINE DIVING

[Greek: —liphon eponumon te reuma kai petraerephae autoktit' antra.]

    ÆSCHYLUS: Prometheus Bound.
Did you ever pause before a calm, bright little pool in the woods, and look steadily at the picture it presents, without feeling as if you had peeped into another world? Every outline is preserved, every tint is freshened and purified, in the cool, glimmering reflection. There is a grace and a softness in the prismatic lymph that give a new form and color to the common and familiar objects it has printed in its still, pellucid depths. Every little basin of clear water by the roadside is a magic mirror, and transforms all that it encloses. There is a vastness of depth, too, in that concave hemisphere, through which the vision sinks like a falling star, that excites and fills the imagination. What it shows is only a shadow, but all things seen are mere shadows painted on the retina, and you have, at such times, a realistic sense of the beautiful and bold imagery which calls a favorite fountain of the East the Eye of the Desert.

The alluring softness of this mimic world increases to sublimity when, instead of some rocky basin, dripping with mossy emeralds and coral berries, you look upon the deep crystalline sea. Each mates to its kind. This does not gather its imagery from gray, mossy rock or pendent leaf or flower, but draws into its enfolding arms the wide vault of the cerulean sky. The richness of the majestic azure is deepened by that magnificent marriage. The pale blue is darkened to violet. Far through the ever-varying surface of the curious gelatinous liquid breaks the phosphorescence, sprinkled into innumerable lights and cross-lights. As you look upon those endless pastures thought is quickened with the conception of their innumerable phases of vitality. The floating weed, whose meshes measure the spaces of continents and archipelagoes, is everywhere instinct with animal and vegetable life. The builder coral, glimmering in its softer parts with delicate hues and tints, throws up its stony barrier through a thousand miles of length and a third as much in breadth, fringing the continents with bays and sounds and atoll islands like fairy rings of the sea. Animate flowers—sea-nettles, sea anemones, plumularia, campanularia, hydropores, confervae, oscillatoria, bryozoa—people the great waters. Sea-urchins, star-fish, sea-eggs, combative gymnoti, polypes, struggle and thrive with ever-renewing change of color; gelatinous worms that shine like stars cling to every weed; glimmering animalcules, phosphorescent medusae, the very deep itself is vivid with sparkle and corruscation of electric fire. So through every scale, from the zoophyte to the warm-blooded whale, the sea teems with life, out of which fewer links have been dropped than from sub-aërial life. It is a matter for curious speculation that the missing species belong not to the lower subsidiary genera, as in terrene animals, but to the highest types of marine life. In the quarries of Lyme Regis, among the accumulations of a sea of the Liassic period, lay the huge skeleton of the Ichthyosaurus, a warm-blooded marine existence, with huge saucer eyes of singular telescopic power, that gleamed radiant "with the eyelids of the morning," "by whose neesings alight doth shine"—the true leviathan of Job. In the same extinct sea is found the skeleton of the Plesiosaurus, a marine lizard of equal size, and warm-blooded, whose swan-like neck and body graced the serene seas of the pre-adamite world. Another was that of the Pterodactyl, the antique aragon, a winged fish. The task of sustaining these existences was too great for old Ocean, and the monsters dropped from the upper end of the chain into the encrusting mud, the petrified symbols of failure. So one day man may drop into the limbo of vanities, among the abandoned tools in the Creator's workshop.

But, however high or low the degree in the scale, one distinguishing feature marks the vital creation in vegetable or animal—an intelligence capable of adjusting itself to the elements about it, and electing its food. The sunflower, even, does not follow the sun by a mechanical law, but, growing by a fair, bright sheet of water, looks as constantly at that shining surface for the beloved light as ever did the fabled Greek boy at his own image in the fountain. The tendrils of the vine seek and choose their own support, and the thirsty spongioles of the root find the nourishing veins of water. Growth, says a naturalist, is the conscious motion of vegetable life. But this theory of kinship, imperfect in the plant, becomes plain and distinct in the animate creation. However far removed, the wild dolphin at play and the painted bird in the air are cousins of man, with a responsive chord of sympathy connecting them.

It is this feeling that sends an exhilarating thrill through the submarine explorer when a school of porpoises frisk by with undulating grace, the marine type of a group of frolicking children. It is the instinctive perception that it is a pure enjoyment to the fish, the healthy glow and laugh of submarine existence. But for that sense of sympathetic nature the flying-fish, reeling porpoise and dolphin would be no more to him than the skipping shuttle in a weaver's loom, the dull impetus of senseless machinery. Self-generated motion is the outward and visible sign of vitality—its wanton exercise the symbol and expression of enjoyment. The poor philosopher who distinguished humanity as singular in the exhibition of humor had surely never heard a mocking-bird sing, watched a roguish crow or admired a school of fish.

This keen appreciation of a kindred life in the sea has thrown its charm over the poetry and religion of all races. Ocean us leaves the o'erarching floods and rocky grottoes at the call of bound Prometheus; Cyrene, with her nymphs, sits in the cool Peneus, where comes Aristaeus mourning for his stolen bees; the Druid washed his hedge-hyssop in the sacred water, and priestesses lived on coral reefs visited by remote lovers in their sundown seas; Schiller's diver goes into the purpling deep and sees the Sea-Horror reaching out its hundred arms; the beautiful Undine is the vivid poetry of the sea. Every fountain has its guardian saint or nymph, and to this day not only the German peasant and benighted English boor thrill at the sight of some nymph-guarded well, but the New Mexican Indian offers his rude pottery in propitiation of the animate existence, the deity of the purling spring.

"Der Taucher," for all the rhythm and music that clothes his luckless plunge, was but a caitiff knight to some of our submarine adventurers. A diver during the bay-fight in Mobile harbor had reason to apprehend a more desperate encounter. A huge cuttle-fish, the marine monster of Pliny and Victor Hugo, had been seen in the water. His tough, sinuous, spidery arms, five fathoms long, wavered visibly in the blue transparent gulf,

Und schaudernd dacht ich's—da kroch's heran,
Regte hundert Gelenke zugleich,
Will schnappen nach mir.

A harpoon was driven into the leathery, pulpy body of the monster, but with no other effect than the sudden snapping of the inch line like thread. It was subsequent to this that, as the diver stayed his steps in the unsteady current, his staff was seized below. The water was murky with the river-silt above the salt brine, and he could see nothing, but after an effort the staff was rescued or released. Curious to know what it was, he probed again, and the stick was wrenched from his hand. With a thrill he recognized in such power the monster of the sea, the devil-fish. He returned anxious, doubtful, but resolute. Few like to be driven from a duty by brute force. He armed himself, and descended to renew the hazardous encounter in the gloomy solitude of the sea-bottom. I would I had the wit to describe that tournament beneath the sea; the stab, thrust, curvet, plunge—the conquest and capture of the unknown combatant. A special chance preserves the mediaeval character of the contest, saving it from the sulphurous associations of modern warfare that might be suggested by the name of devil-fish. No: the antagonist wore a coat-of-mail and arms of proof, as became a good knight of the sea, and was besides succulent, digestible—a veritable prize for the conqueror. It was a monstrous crab.

The constant encounter of strange and unforeseen perils enables the professional diver to meet them with the same coolness with which ordinary and familiar dangers are confronted on land. On one occasion a party of such men were driven out into the Gulf by a fierce "norther," were tossed about like chips for three days in the vexed element, scant of food, their compass out of order, and the horizon darkened with prevailing storm. At another time a party wandered out in the shallows of one of the keys that fringe the Gulf coast. They amused themselves with wading into the water, broken into dazzling brilliance. A few sharks were seen occasionally, which gradually and unobserved increased to, a squadron. The waders meanwhile continued their sport until the evening waned away. Far over the dusk violet Night spread her vaporous shadows:

The blinding mist came up and hid the land,
And round and round the land,
And o'er and o'er the land,
As far as eye could see.

At last they turned their steps homeward, crossing the little sandy key, between which and the beach lay a channel shoulder-deep, its translucent waves now glimmering with phosphorescence. But here they were met by an unexpected obstacle. The fleet of sharks, with a strategical cunning worthy of admiration, had flanked the little island, and now in the deeper water formed in ranks and squadrons, and, with their great goggle eyes like port-fires burning, lay ready to dispute the passage. Armed with such weapons as they could clutch, the men dashed into the water with paeans and shouts and the broken pitchers of fallen Jericho. The violet phosphorescence lighted them on their way, and tracked with luminous curve and star every move of the enemy. The gashed water at every stroke of club or swish of tail or fin bled in blue and red fire, as if the very sea was wounded. The enemy's line of battle was broken and scattered, but not until more than one of the assailants had looked point-blank into the angry eyes of a shark and beaten it off with actual blows. It was the Thermopylae of sharkdom, with numbers reversed—a Red Sea passage resonant with psalms of victory.

There are novel difficulties as well as dangers to be encountered. The native courage of the man must be tempered, ground and polished. On land it is the massing of numbers that accomplishes the result—the accumulation of vital forces and intelligence upon the objective point. The innumerable threads of individual enterprise, like the twist of a Manton barrel, give the toughest tensile power. Under the sea, however, it is often the strength of the single thread, the wit of the individual pitted against the solid impregnability of the elements, the vis inertiae of the sea. It looks as if uneducated Nature built her rude fastnesses and rocky battlements with a special I view to resistance, making the fickle and I unstable her strongest barricade. An example of the skill and address necessary to conquer obstacles of the latter kind was illustrated in Mobile Bay. There lay about a sunken vessel an impenetrable mail of quicksand. It became necessary to sink piles into this material. The obstacle does not lie in its fickle, unstable character, but its elastic tension. It swallows a nail or a beam by slow, serpent-like deglutition. It is hungry, insatiable, impenetrable. Try to force it, to drive down a pile by direct force: it resists. The mallet is struck back by reverberating elasticity with an equal force, and the huge pointed stake rebounds. Brute force beats and beats in vain. The fickle sand will not be driven—no, not an inch.

Wit comes in where weight breaks down. A force-pump, a common old-style fire-engine, was rigged up, the nozzle and hose bound to a huge pile,

to equal which the tallest pine
Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast
Of some great ammiral, were but a wand.

The pump was set to work. The water tore through the nostril-pipe, boring a hole with such rapidity that the tall beam dropped into the socket with startling suddenness. Still breathing torrents, the pipe was withdrawn: the clutching sand seized, grappled the stake. It is cemented in.

You may break, you may shatter the stake, if you will,

but—you can never pull it out.

Perhaps the most singular and venturesome exploit ever performed in submarine diving was that of searching the sunken monitor Milwaukee during the bay-fight in Mobile harbor. This sea-going fortress was a huge double-turreted monitor, with a ponderous, crushing projectile force in her. Her battery of four fifteen-inch guns, and the tough, insensible solidity of her huge wrought-iron turrets and heavy plated hulk, burdened the sleepy waters of the bay. Upon a time she braced her iron jacket about her, girded her huge sides with fifteen-inch pistolry, and went rolling her clumsy volume down the bay to mash Fort Taylor to rubbish and débacle. The sea staggered under her ponderous gliding and groaned about her massive bulk as she wended her awkward course toward the bay-shore over against the fort. She sighted her blunderbusses, and, rolling, grunting, wheezing in her revolving towers like a Falstaff ill at ease, spat her gobbets of flame and death. The poor little water-spaniel fort ran down to the shore and barked at her of course. Cui bono or malo? Why, like Job's mates, fill its poor belly with the east wind, or try to draw out leviathan with a hook, or his tongue with a cord thou lettest down? Yet who treads of the fight between invulnerable Achilles and heroic Hector, and admires Achilles? The admiral of the American fleet, sick of the premature pother, signaled the lazy solidity to return. The loathly monster, slowly, like a bull-dog wrenched from his victim, rolled snarling, lazily, leisurely down the bay, not obeying and yet not disobeying the signal.

All along the sunny coast, like flowers springing up in a battle-field, were rows of little white cottages, tenanted by women and children—love, life and peace in the midst of ruin and sudden death. At the offending spectacle of homely peace among its enemies the unglutted monster eased its huge wrath. Tumbling and bursting among the poor little pasteboard shells of cottages, where children played and women gossiped of the war, and prayed for its end, no matter how, fell the huge globes and cones of murder. Shrieks and cries, slain babes and wounded women on shore; surly, half-mutinous officers and crew on that iron hulk, shocked at the fell work they were set to do; and the glimmer and wash of the bay-water below—that sweet, tranquil, half-transparent liquid, with idle weeds and chips upon it, empty crates and boxes of dead merchandise, sacked of their life and substance by the war, as one might swallow an oyster; the soft veils of shadowy ships and the distant city spires; umbrageous fires and slips of shining sand all mirrored in the soft and quiet sea, while this devilish pother went on. There is a buoy adrift! No, it is a sodden cask, perhaps of spoiling meat, while the people in the town yonder are starving; and still the huge iron, gluttonous monster bursts its foam of blood and death, while the surly crew curse and think of mothers and babes at home. Better to look at the bay, the idle, pleasing summer water, with chips and corks and weeds upon it; better to look at the bubbling cask yonder—much better, captain, if you only knew it! But the reluctant, heavy iron turret groans and wheezes on its pivotal round, and it will be a minute or half a minute before the throated hell speaks again. But it will speak: machinery is fatally accurate to time and place. Can nothing stay it, or stop the trembling of those bursting iron spheres among yon pretty print-like homes? No: look at the buoy, wish-wash, rolling lazily, bobbing in the water, a lazy, idle cask, with nothing in the world to do on this day of busy mischief. What hands coopered it in the new West? what farmer filled it? There is the grunting of swine, lowing of cattle, in the look of the staves. But the turret groans and wheezes and goes around, whether you look at it or not. What cottage this time? The soft lap-lap of the water goes on, and the tedious cask gets nearer: it will slide by the counter. You have a curious interest in that. No: it grates under the bow; it—Thunder and wreck and ruin! Has the bay burst open and swallowed us? The huge, invulnerable iron monster—not invulnerable after all—has met its master in the idle cask. It is blind, imprisoned Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple. The tough iron plates at the bow are rent and torn and twisted like wet paper. A terrible hole is gashed in the hull. The monster wobbles, rolls, gasps, and drinks huge gulps of water like a wounded man—desperately wounded, and dying in his thirsty veins and arteries. The swallowed torrent rushes aft, hissing and quenching the fires; beats against the stern, and comes forward with the rush of that repulse to meet the incoming wave. Into the boats, the water—anywhere but here. She reels again and groans; and then, as a desperate hero dies, she slopes her huge warlike beak at the hostile water and rushes to her own ruin with a surge and convulsion. The victorious sea sweeps over it and hides it, laughing at her work. She will keep it safely. That is the unsung epic of the Milwaukee, without which I should have little to say of the submarine diving during the bay-fight.

The harbor of Mobile is shaped like a rude Innuit boot. At the top, Tensaw and Mobile Rivers, in their deltas, make, respectively, two and three looplike bands, like the straps. The toe is Bonsecour Bay, pointing east. The heel rests on Dauphin Island, while the main channel flows into the hollow of the foot between Fort Morgan and Dauphin Island. In the north-west angle, obscured by the foliage, lay the devoted city, suffering no less from artificial famine, made unnecessarily, than the ligatures that stopped the vital current of trade. Tons of meat were found putrefying while the citizens, and even the garrison, had been starving on scanty rations. Food could be purchased, but at exorbitant rates, and the medium of exchange, Confederate notes, all gone to water and waste paper. The true story of the Lost Cause has yet to be written. North of Mobile, in the Trans-Mississippi department, thousands whose every throb was devoted to the enterprise, welcomed the Northern invaders, not as destroyers of a hope already dead by the act of a few entrusted with its defence, but as something better than the anarchy that was not Southern independence or anything else human.

Such were the condition, period and place—the people crushed between the upper and nether millstones of two hostile and contending civilizations—when native thrift evoked a new element, that set in sharp contrast the heroism of life and the heroism of death, the courage that incurs danger to save against the courage that accepts danger to destroy. The work was the saving of the valuable arms—costing the government thirty thousand dollars per gun—and the machinery of the sunken Milwaukee.[5 - The Milwaukee was sunk nearly due east of the city: the Osage, Tecumseh, several despatch-boats and steamers, besides the three monitors, were sunk by torpedoes in the bay.] By a curious circumstance this party of divers was composed partly, if not principally or entirely, of mechanics and engineers who were exempt from military service under the economic laws of the Confederacy, yet who in heart and soul sympathized with the rebellion. They had worked to save for the South: now they were to work and save for the North. It was a service of superadded danger. All the peril incurred from missile weapons was increased by the hidden danger of the secret under-sea and the presence of the terrible torpedoes. These floated everywhere, in all innocent, unsuspicious shapes. One monster, made of boiler iron, a huge cross, is popularly believed to be still hidden in the bay. The person possessing the chart wherein the masked battery's place was set down is said to have destroyed it and fled. Let us hope, however, that this is an error.

Keep in mind, in reading this account, the contrasted picture of peace in Nature and war in man—the calm blue sky; the soft hazy outlines of woods and bay-shore dropping their soft veils in the water; the cottages, suggesting industry and love; the distant city; the delicate and graceful spars of the Hartford; the busy despatch-steamers plying to and fro; the bursting forts and huge ugly monitors; the starry arches of flying shells by night and flying cloud by day; the soft lap of the water; the sensuous, sweet beauty of that latitude of eternal spring; and the soft dark violet of the outer sea, glassing itself in calm or broken into millioned frets of blue, red and starry fire; the danger above and the danger below; the dark mysterious caverns of the sea, rich with coral grots and grove and abounding marine life; the impenetrable gloom of the ship's hold, whose unimaginable darkness and labyrinthine intricacy of machinery set obstacles at every turn and move and step; the darkness; the fury; the hues and shape, all that art can make or Nature fashion, gild or color wrought into one grand tablature of splendor and magnificence. War and peaceful industry met there in novel rivalry, and each claimed its privileges. The captain of the Search said to the officers, while crowding his men behind the turret, with sly, dry humor, "Come, you are all paid to be shot at: my men are not."

More than once the accuracy of the enemy's fire drove the little party to shelter. Though the diver was shielded by the impenetrable fickle element that gave Achilles invulnerability, the air-pump above was exposed, and thus the diver might be slain by indirection. There lay Achilles' heel, the exposed vulnerable part that Mother Thetis's baptism neglected.

The work below was arduous: the hulk crowded with the entangling machinery of sixteen engines, cuddies, ports, spars, levers, hatches, stancheons, floating trunks, bibulous boxes heavy with drink, and the awful, mysterious gloom of the water, which is not night or darkness, but the absence of any ray to touch the sensitive optic nerve. The sense of touch the only reliance, and the life-line his guide.

But the peril incurred can be better understood through an illustrative example of a perilous adventure and a poor return. Officers and men of the unfortunate monitor asked for the rescue of their property, allowing a stipulated sum in lieu of salvage. Among these was a petty officer, anxious for the recovery of his chest. It involved peculiar hazards, since it carried the diver below the familiar turret-chamber, through the inextricabilis error of entangling machinery in the engine-room, groping among floating and sunken objects, into a remote state-room, the Acheron of the cavernous hold. He was to find by touch a seaman's chest; handle it in that thickening gloom; carry it, push it, move it through that labyrinthine obscurity to a point from which it could be raised. To add immeasurably to the intricacy of this undertaking, there was the need of carrying his life-line and air-hose through all that entanglement and obscurity. Three times in that horror of thick darkness like wool the line tangled in the web of machinery, and three times he had, by tedious endeavor, to follow it up, find the knot and release it. Then the door of the little state-room, the throat of exit, was shut to, and around and around the dense chamber he groped as if in a dream, and could find no vent. All was alike—a smooth, slimy wall, glutinous with that gelatinous liquid, the sea-water. The tangled line became a blind guide and fruitful source of error; the hours were ebbing away, drowning life and vital air in that horrible watery pit;

Aut hoc inclusi ligno occultantur Achivi,

or, a worse enemy than the subtle Greek's, death from the suspended air-current. Speed, nimbleness, strength and activity were worthless: with tedious fingers he must follow the life-line, find its entanglements and slowly loosen them, carefully taking up the slack, and so follow the straightened cord to the door. Then the chest: he must not forget that. Slowly he heaves and pushes, now at this, now at the life-line hitching on knob, handle, lever or projecting peg—on anything or nothing in that maze of machinery; by involution and evolution, like the unknown quantity in a cubic equation, through all the twists, turns, assumptions and substitutions, and always with that unmanageable, indivisible coefficient the box, until he reaches the upper air.

In Aesop's fable, when the crane claimed the reward of the wolf for using his long neck and bill as a forceps in extracting a bone from the latter's oesophagus, Lupus suggests that for the crane to have had his head down in the lupine throat and not get it snapped off was reward enough for any reasonable fowl. The petty officer was sufficiently learned in the Lyceum to administer a like return. The stipulated salvage was never paid or offered.[6 - It was a warrant-officer of the Milwaukee: I do not wish to be more definite; but the money (fifty dollars) may be sent to the editor of this Magazine, who will forward it to the diver.]

The monitors had small square hatches or man-ports let into the deck, admitting one person conveniently.

Hinc via, Tartanii quae fert Acherontis ad undas.

A swinging ladder, whose foot was clear of the floor, led down into the recesses. A diver, having completed his task, ascended the treacherous staircase to escape, and found the hatch blocked up. A floating chest or box had drifted into the opening, and, fitting closely, had firmly corked the man up in that dungeon, tight as a fly in a bottle. From his doubtful perch on the ladder he endeavored to push the obstacle from its insertion. Two or more equal difficulties made this impossible. The box had no handle, and it was slippery with the ooze and mucus of the sea. The leverage of pushing only wedged it faster in the orifice. The inconstant ladder swayed from it as a fulcrum. Again and again by art and endeavor and angle of push he essayed, and the ladder made sport of it. It was deadly sport, that swing and seesaw on the slippery rungs in the immeasurable loneliness of the silent, shrouded cabin. It was no rush of air, sending life tingling in the blood made brilliant with carmine of oxidation, but the dense, mephitic sough of the thick wool of water. He descended and sat upon the floor to think. Feasible methods had failed, and the sands of his life were running out like the old physician's. Now to try the impracticable. There are heaps of wisdom in the wrong way sometimes, which, I suppose, is the reason some of us like it. The box was out of his reach, choked in the gullet of that life-hole. No spring or leap from floor or ladder could reach its slippery side or bear it from its fixture. The sea had caught him prowling in its mysteries, and blocked him up, as cruel lords of ancient days walled up the intruder on their domestic privacy. Wit after brute force: man and Nature were pitted against each other in the uncongenial gloom—life the stake.

He groped about his prison, glutinous with infusoriae and the oily consistence of the sea. Here a nail, there a block or lever, shaped out mentally by the touch, theorized, studied upon and thrown down. Now a hatchet, monkey-wrench, monkey's-tail, or gliding fish or wriggling eel, companions of his imprisonment. At last the cold touch of iron: the hand encloses and lifts it; its weight betrays its length; he feels it to the end—blunt, square, useless. He tries the other end—an edge or spike. That will do. Standing under the hatch, guided by the ladder to the position, and with a strong swinging, upward blow, the new tool is driven into the soft, fibrous and adhesive pine bottom of the box. On the principle on which your butler's practiced elbow draws the twisted screw sunk into the cobwebbed seal of your '48 port, he uncorks himself. The box pulled out of the hatch, the sea-gods threw up the sponge, that zoophyte being handy.

These few incidents, strung together at random, and embracing only limited experiences out of many in one enterprise, are illustrative, in their variety and character, of this hardy pursuit, and the fascination of danger which is the school of native hardihood. But they give the reader a very imperfect idea of the nature and appearance of the new element into which man has pushed his industry. The havoc and spoil, the continued danger and contention, darken the gloom of the submarine world as a flash of lightning leaves blacker the shadow of the night and storm.

The first invention to promote subaqueous search was the diving-bell, a clumsy vessel which isolates the diver. It is embarrassing, if not dangerous, where there is a strong current or if it rests upon a slant deck. It limits the vision, and in one instance it is supposed the wretched diver was taken from the bell by a shark. It permits an assistant, however, and a bold diver will plunge from the deck above and ascend in the vessel, to the invariable surprise of his companion. An example of one of its perils, settling in the mud, occurred, I think, in the port of New York. A party of amateurs, supported by champagne flasks and a reporter, went down. The bell settled and stuck like a boy's sucker. One of the party proposed shaking or rocking the bell, and doing so, the water was forced under and the bell lifted from the ooze.

But a descent in submarine armor is the true way to visit the world under water. The first sensation in descending is the sudden bursting roar of furious, Niagarac cascades in the ears. It thunders and booms upon the startled nerve with the rush and storm of an avalanche. The sense quivers with it. But it is not air shaken by reflected blows: it is the cascades driven into the enclosing helmet by the force-pump. As the flexile hose has to be stiffly distended to bear an aqueous gravity of twenty-five to fifty pounds to the square inch, the force of the current can be estimated. The tympanum of the ear yields to the fierce external pressure. The brain feels and multiplies the intolerable tension as if the interior was clamped in a vice, and that tumultuous, thunderous torrent pours on. Involuntarily the mouth opens: the air rushes in the Eustachian tube, and with sudden velocity strikes the intruded tension of the drum, which snaps back to its normal state with a sharp, pistol-like crack. The strain is momently relieved to be renewed again, and again relieved by the same attending salutes.

In your curious dress you must appear monstrous, even to that marine world, familiar with abnormal creations. The whale looks from eyes on the top of his head; the flat-fish, sole, halibut have both eyes on the same side; and certain Crustacea place the organ on a foot-stalk, as if one were to hold up his eye in his hand to include a wider horizon. But the monster which the fish now sees differs from all these. It has four great goggle eyes arranged symmetrically around its head. Peering through these plate-glass optics, the diver sees the curious, strange beauty of the world around him, not as the bather sees it, blurred and indistinct, but in the calm splendor of its own thallassphere. The first thought is one of unspeakable admiration of the miraculous beauty of everything around him—a glory and a splendor of refraction, interference and reflection that puts to shame the Arabian story of the kingdom of the Blue Fish. Above him is that pure golden canopy with its rare glimmering lustrousness—something like the soft, dewy effulgence that comes with sun-breaks through showery afternoons. The soft delicacy of that pure straw-yellow that prevails everywhere is crossed and lighted by tints and glimmering hues of accidental and complementary color indescribably elegant. The floor of the sea rises like a golden carpet in gentle incline to the surface; but this incline, experience soon teaches, is an ocular deception, the effect of refraction, such as a tumbler of water and a spoon can exhibit in petty. It is perhaps the first observable warning that you are in a new medium, and that your familiar friend, the light, comes to you altered in its nature; and it is as well to remember this and "make a note on it."