chapter 1 



A WONDERER UNDER SEA 



BEFORE many years, along the temperate and tropical 

 , seaboards of the world, conversations will be heard 

 which to many people today would seem fantastic 

 or at least prophetic of a century hence. Hosts and host- 

 esses will be summoning their house parties to row with 

 them off shore, to put on helmets, dive and inspect at 

 leisure the new coral plantings and beds which a seascape 

 gardener has lately arranged. And later in the year his 

 purple and lavender sea anemones will take first and second 

 prizes in the local sea-flower show. Mothers will be begged 

 by their boys to let them go again and play pirates in the 

 hold of the old wreck just inside the reef and three fathoms 

 down. Submerged artists will wax wroth with an over- 

 clouded sky because the half-finished painting of the 

 canyon, four and twenty feet below the surface, must 

 have full sunlight to show its miraculous coloring. 



I have set a very brief time when these things will be 

 of common occurrence because today, in scores of places, 

 they are already being done. A few fears bred of ignorance 

 need only to be broken down to make the sport of helmet 



diving widespread and one of the last of the great out- 



3 



