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.