The only unpleasant sensation of my stay below was a slight drumming in the ears--walking under the water I found an easy matter--and when hauled to the surface I declared my first attempt at diving a wholly successful one. However, the man whose suit I had borrowed, smiled at my enthusiasm, and declared with something akin to contempt that there was a good deal of difference between deep-sea diving and grubbing about the East River for a lost anchor. I learned before we parted that he was a deep-sea diver forced for the moment to accept whatever task came to hand, but there was truth in what he said; and I am also convinced, after talks with a dozen members of his fraternity, that neither a single descent nor even many descents into the depths, can give one an adequate idea of the weird strangeness of a diver's life. That can come only from the cumulative experience of a lifetime. Almost all the submarine work on the Atlantic coast is done by divers living in New York or Boston. There are about as many skilled divers in Boston as New York--perhaps twenty in each city. The pay of a skilled diver is five dollars a day of four hours or less. In that time a man may descend half a dozen times, or he may descend once and stay four hours, but be his period of labor long or short, it counts as a day. If at the end of four hours he descends again that descent counts as another day's labor. The diver's assistant receives three dollars. He is a skilled man, whose business it is to manage the life-line and the hose, and who sometimes becomes a diver. The pumpers, who run the pump that keeps the diver supplied with air, are each paid two dollars a day. They are not skilled workmen and seldom develop into divers. Probably a third of the New York divers do not work for wages. These are men who own their outfits and prefer to work by the job. Some of the self-employing divers enjoy good incomes from their labors. As a rule, a diver of this class goes down, looks at a sunken vessel, and then states what he will charge to raise her. Diver Victor Hinston was paid $150 a day for locating the sunken steamship City of Chester, and Captain Anthony Williams, having raised the schooner Dauntless in two days, received $750 for his time and trouble. The same diver, having repaired with iron plates and raised in four days the steamer Meredith, ashore near Jeremie, in Hayti, demanded and was paid $7,500 for his work. The divers of New York live much as other citizens of the metropolis. A majority of them are native Americans, with homes, wives and children. They are, of course, absent from home a great deal and on short notice, for divers from New York are not only sent all over the eastern coast of the continent, but even to the Great Lakes and the interior rivers, most of their work lying beyond the city.