entrance to a linen closet. When I opened it I saw that it was a little stateroom.

"There, sure enough, was the girl, sitting on a red plush lounge opposite the door, quite natural. She wore some kind of a white muslin dress and a smart little chip hat, and was holding a satchel in her hands, just as if she was waitin' to go ashore. Her eyes were open and she was lookin' right at me and smiling. When I pulled open the door it set the water in motion and she dropped her satchel and came toward me, holdin' out her arms.

'I jumped back and shut the door and sat down on one of the screw chairs in the saloon, for I was fair turned with the queerness of it. When I had got over the strain, I made ready to send her up. But, as it was, I never went into the stateroom again. I began to wonder if, after all, it was n't better to leave her as she was. You see, I was a bit young then and sentimental-like, as all folks are that have to do with the sea. I thought of that crowd of men up there on the float, and she the only girl, and they handing her about and staring at her and she not knowing - with never a relative of hers within a thousand miles and no woman to take care of her. Then I remembered the old divers' superstition about folks never really dying till they came up to the surface. Of course, that was foolishness — but I believed it then. I don't know maybe I believe it now. But, at any rate, I told myself that at that moment she was lovely and sweet and all, in her little chip hat and her white muslin frock, but if I sent her up she'd be buried, put in a hole of dirt, with the worms and the dark. If I left her away from the air, shut up there in that little stateroom, thirty fathom deep, in that still quiet green water, she'd always stay as she was always be nineteen.

'The key was on the outside of the stateroom door. I locked the door with

out opening it and battened down the ventilator so that nothing-no fish or anything could get in. I went to the outside of the ship and saw to it that the porthole of her stateroom was fast. Then I took a last look through the port. She was lyin' on the floor near the door, with her face hidden, as though she was sorry I had left her so. An' one arm was reachin' out a little, palm up, as though she was waitin' for me to come back as if she expected that I would come back some day and she wanted to tell me she wasn't angry.

"Then I signaled to be pulled up and left her that way, just waiting, quietlike and all alone in that still green water. On the float I told them that I hadn't seen anything and no doubt the current had carried her away.

"There was some talk of my company raising the Allouette, but I reported that she was broken up so bad that it wouldn't be worth while. People quit talking about the packet, and the girl's father married again, down in Mexico. I guess he's got another daughter by now. In a year's time the whole business was forgotten.

'But I never forgot. You see, a lad at that age, a sea-faring lad, when he gets an impression, it sticks and sticks and goes deeper. Maybe it turned my wits a little. Maybe they're still turned. I've never forgot her. I forgot, though, about being frightened and only remembered the pretty way of her coming toward me, smiling and holding out her arms. And though I've grown to an old man, she's always stayed young, just as sweet and fresh and pretty as she was the first day I saw her. Somehow I could never take to other girls after that or love anybody but just her. I always remembered her down there in all that still green water, waiting for me to come back and open the door. And remembering her like that always kept me straight and clean, I guess.

And everybody else has forgotten her, but me. Nobody knows she's waiting there, and her father has another daughter by now. She's only got me, you see. She just belongs to me.'

In the pause that followed I could barely make out the waves that leaped before me; there seemed to be a mist before my eyes.

'I never saw her again. I came away the next day and never went back. That was a long time ago. But next week I'm going to get a sloop and go along the coast to the Catalinas and go down and see her. I'm getting old now, you see. And old men, after a while they kind of get young again in a way. Sorter move in a circle. Maybe my circle is nearly done, but I feel to-day as I felt that day when I first found her and we were both young. So I guess I'll go down there.'

'But Naylon,' I protested, 'how would it be? This is all so long ago. Would she be just the same? Maybe I'm wrong-don't know much about such things but the action of the sea water-'

'No,' he interrupted. "There was no air, you see. The place was almost hermetically sealed. I battened down the ventilators and locked the door. She is just the same to-day as she was long ago, when I first saw her. It can't be otherwise. I'll not believe it so. They never really die, so long as they stay below.'

Naylon's pipe was out. The Cape Horner had long since passed the heads with the turning of the tide, and by the time we reached the Presidio on our way home the Farallones were standing out purple-black against the conflagration of the sunset.

II

The next week Naylon got his leave of absence and found a man by the

name of Willetts, a retired sea captain, to take his place. We chartered a seagoing sloop and cleared for the Catalina Islands. The Coast Survey people had buoyed the wreck of the Allouette, - much harm the old packet could do at that depth, at that depth, and Naylon located i by this means almost immediately. I shall never forget the old fellow's agitation on the day we arrived and tied up at the buoy. What the emotions were that conflicted in his poor old troubled brain, judge you. He was to see again the girl he had loved half a century ago and whom he had never seen alive. He was to look for the last time upon a dead face. There was something of the funeral in it — and something of the wedding. It was a strange situation.

When I had helped him on with the armor and opened the seacock at the helmet's throat, I noted that he had the Deremal rod a very sharp knifeunder his weight belt.

'It's shark water,' he explained, reading my glance of inquiry. But I had seen no sharks.

He had already told me the kinds of peril he really incurred. His lines, the life- and air-line, might be cut by friction against the sharp edge of brass or copper or the pressure might become too great for him.

'As a lad I stood it well enough,' he said, 'but I'm an old man now and a hundred and eighty feet is a wonder deep dive. See,' he continued, holding up a key, 'here's the key to her stateroom. I've always kept it.'

I laced down the helmet. We said good-bye, and as we shook hands I felt his calloused palm quivering against mine. He was as excited as a boy — a boy of twenty. Then he went over the side.

For some time I could follow the red glint of his copper helmet, dropping away under the shadow of the boat.

Then at length it disappeared, and only the shifting weight and the pull on the life-line were left me. I paid out over the boat's side until suddenly the line fell limp and I knew that Naylon's feet were on the deck of the Allouette.

I turned the wheel of the pump unsteadily, my heart knocking at my palate, for it is not good to see a living man descend into the nether world from out the light of day. The two lines ran slowly out, now pausing, now giving out by jerks. Once he signaled that I was giving him too much air, and as I slacked the pump and watched the lines still running out, I could fancy that I traced his movements thus. That long straight even run marked his progress down the deck. The shorter flight, after that moment's pause, no doubt indicated his descent down a hatchway. Now he was upon the berth-deck; now in the saloon companion-way; now crawling over that pile of wreckage he spoke of, where the lines might easily be sliced in two; now he was in the saloon itself; and now was not his hand upon the stateroom door?

There was no further movement of the lines. Naylon must be there, there in the open doorway of that little stateroom which he had left so many years before.

The lines had ceased to run out. Ten, fifteen minutes passed without a movement, while I turned the pump and looked out over the indifferent face of the broad blue Pacific that held there in its depths so strange a little drama. The sloop lay some hundred feet off a rugged, tree-grown slope, desolate but for an occasional sheep or a circling bird. The heat lay close over the ocean like the shutting down of a great warm palm. The water talked incessantly under the sloop's forefoot, and a blue dragon-fly, arched like a bow, lighted from time to time upon the boat's painter. But for the plaint of the un

willing pump and the talking of the water, it was very still.

Presently I looked at my watch and was surprised to note that Naylon had been down over an hour. At so great a depth I knew this to be very dangerous. Another half-hour passed in increasing anxiety, while I waited for some signal from him. When two hours had gone by, I could wait no longer, and warned him by a pull on the lifeline.

An empty feeling on the line itself caught at my heart. I hauled in quickly. The line came home slack. I drew at the air-line. That, too, returned to the boat without the least resistance. When I had drawn both in, I found them cut in two. Had Naylon cut them with his knife, or had they been severed by some sharp edge of brass or copper in the wreckage? I could never tell- but I suspected.

I believe I fully came to myself only by the time I had the sloop half-way around the island on my way to the little town on the shoreward side, to tell of what had happened. Then I asked myself what good could come of it. My mind traversed the same course as that which Naylon had already outlined to me. His body, confined down there between the decks of the Allouette, would never rise. Why not leave him there? How did I know that he had not wished that end-planned it even? Or, supposing that his death had been accidental, was it not best to leave the two of them as they were the old man and the girl of nineteen, deep down in the calm untouched quiet of the ocean floor?

-

I recalled what Naylon had said, and half believed, of the legend of the deepsea divers the story of the drowned who do not die.

So I left them there together and came away.

The other day a letter reached me

I

To suggest what is felt by those who never had the honor of so much as a glimpse of Henry James the man, it is necessary only to say that Henry James the craftsman has become, by the sharp physical finality of death, at last wholly and securely ours. A living author is the more or less prized property of his age, to be cuffed or caressed, or both, as the caprice of the age wills: a dead author is the undisputed possession of the many or few who duly love him. The genius of Henry James, which has for twenty years past expressed itself both as a ripened historical influence and as a series of vivid and commanding appeals to the renewed contemporary appreciation, has attained its rounded completion, not by any possibility to be added to; and this very lamentable fact of the last page blackened over, the last word dictated, has the effect of making over his genius to us bodily as a sum-total, the most lavish gift surely of our time, if one except that of Meredith. We find our title to his gift confirmed in the obituary columns of all manner of dailies and weeklies and their several 'supplements' columns that have seemed to slam a door on our treasure-room of the past and, with a parting twist of the rusted key, crunchingly to lock it; which sovereign gesture of dismissal we need only interpret as a surrender of the key to whatever VOL. 117 - NO.6

fortunate comer knows how to turn it, in order to get at the full volume of our inheritance. Such at least will be the attitude of those for whom a new and complete Henry James begins just where the frayed and fragmentary subject of journalism has lately ended; those who feel his death as a summons to the calm privilege of considering his worth and of trying to measure the full extent of what he has come to mean to them.

How much there has been to interfere with the serenity and solid comfort of our possession of him, those can appreciate whose helpless solicitude has followed him, on his more or less annual 'appearances,' through the rough gauntlet of criticisms, reviews, notices, parodies - the tumult of jeers mostly echoed and therefore meaningless, meaningless and therefore unanswerable except by his answer of silence. We have not had, happily for ourselves, the distress of seeing him mind what the heedless said of him: he bore everything as though it had not existed, and to the practical purpose of convincing us eventually that for him it really did not exist. In that he was like a slender and shrinking youth of incredible unsophistication, caught in some bar-room medley of lewd songs meant to confuse him, and obscene jokes at his expense, not only not knowing in his innocence what it could all possibly mean, but, wondrously and beautifully,

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