The present style of life belt, or rather jacket, is not the old-fashioned kind filled with hard cork, but a larger and more bulky affair filled with fibre, and when you have it on you look and feel like a padded football player, especially around the shoulders. When I shook this wire off my head, it caught me around the shoulders on the soft pad, and I couldn’t shake it off. It took me down under the water and turned me upside down. I tell you I “kicked.” I came up none the worse for my ducking, for it simply reminded me of one of my various trips down to see “Susy the Mermaid” when I was a youngster at Camp Asquam and the older boys used to duck us youngsters anywhere from five to fifteen times a day, according to the unpardonable sins we were supposed to have committed; and these weren’t mere “duckings” either. They used to push us under, put their feet on our shoulders, and then give a good shove, so that we went down anywhere from six to sixteen feet under water. I hated the duckings at that time, but they proved mighty good training! When I came up, after shaking the Marconi wire, the waves bearing the wreckage and people were upon me. After swimming around and helping those I could by pushing them pieces of wreckage to which to cling, I saw a short distance away a collapsible lifeboat floating right side up, swam to it, and climbed aboard. A seaman quickly followed, and a fine husky chap he proved to be. I heard my name called, and for the moment I didn’t realize whether it was a call from Heaven or Hell, but when I turned in the direction of the voice I found the man to be G----, one of the three men with whom I had played cards each evening. I pulled him up on the boat, and we three got out our jackknives and went at a kind of can-opening operation, which was really the removing of the canvas cover of the boat. They call that invention a “boat,” but to start with, it is nothing but a “raft.” Let me try to draw you a word picture and see if you will understand it. Suppose you floated a real lifeboat in the water, and at the water line cut down the sides so that the bottom of the boat that was left floated flush with the water. Then deck over and make watertight this part of the boat that is left. This gives you a round bottomed, watertight raft, floating almost flush with the water. Take a long piece of about 24-inch high (or wide) canvas that will reach all around the sides from one end back to the same end. Nail the lower edge of this canvas to the outside edge of the “raft.” To enable you to raise these “collapsible” canvas sides and to keep them in place, make a stout rail that will be curved to the shape of the floor of the “raft” and nail the top edge of the canvas on to it.