Another of Captain Abe's old mates, McGavern by name, while at work in New Zealand waters, had an equally harrowing, although fortunately less harmful, encounter with that most formidable of all marine monsters, the devil fish. The diver was laying some wharf-blocks when suddenly surprised by his uncanny foe. Despite his struggles--and he was a giant in stature and strength--the monster quickly and completely overpowered him. He was locked in the tremendous claws of the devil fish, and fastened helpless against a submerged spile. McGavern realized his peril, and kept quiet until his assailant, whose arms measured nearly nine feet, loosened his hold. Then he signalled to be drawn up, and came to the surface with the writhing creature still clinging to his back. Captain Abe served before the mast in his youth, and I find that, other things being equal, sailors make the best divers of all. Their former experience is apt to render them cool and quick-witted in the presence of danger, and their knowledge of a ship's rigging and construction proves of untold value to them in their work. To his training as a sailor Captain Charles Smith, a well-known Boston diver, probably owed his truly marvelous escape from death when overtaken by accident while at work on the sunken hull of the Clara Post, in the harbor of Bridgeport, Conn., a few years ago. The wreck lay sixteen fathoms deep, and when Captain Smith descended to examine it, he found that the masts had gone by the board, and that the deck had been torn off by the waves, while the cross timbers strewed with the wreckage, hung over the decks and into the hold. Captain Smith began to cut them away, when suddenly the tangled mass shifted and fell part way in the hold, catching him with it and prisoning him as in a vise. The diver could not see far in the deep water in which he was at work, and finding himself pinned in, how he could not tell, he pulled the life-line three times--the signal that his life was in peril. He felt himself rising a few feet; then all the wreckage fell in upon him, pinning him more securely than before. Worse still, when he tried to free himself, he found that the air-pipe had encountered some unseen obstruction, and that to attempt to move about would shut off his supply of air. The peril was one that made each moment seem like eternity. [Illustration: A DIVER READY TO DESCEND]