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Rh couple of hours I had earned my living. The last anxiety left me.

Mike had a day off, so he came home for dinner at noon and he had great news. They wanted men to work under water in the iron caissons of Brooklyn Bridge and they were giving from five to ten dollars a day.

"Five dollars", cried Mrs. Mulligan, "it must be dangerous or unhealthy or somethin'—sure, you'd never put the child to work like that."

Mike excused himself, but the danger, if danger there was, appealed to me almost as much as the big pay: my only fear was that they'd think me too small or too young. I had told Mrs. Mulligan I was sixteen, for I didn't want to be treated as a child and now I showed her the eighty cents I had earned that morning bootblacking, and she advised me to keep on at it and not go to work under the water; but the promised five dollars a day won me.

Next morning Mike took me to Brooklyn Bridge soon after five o'clock to see the Contractor: he wanted to engage Mike at once but shook his head over me. "Give me a trial", I pleaded, "You'll see, I'll make good." After a pause, "O. K.", he said, "four shifts have gone down already underhanded; you may try."

I've told about the work and its dangers at some length in my novel "The Bomb", but here I may add some details just to show what labor has to suffer.

In the bare shed where we got ready the men told me no one could do the work for long without getting the "bends"; the "bends", it appeared, were a sort of convulsive fit that twisted one's body like a knot and often made you an invalid for life. They soon explained the whole procedure to me. We worked, it appeared, in a huge bell-shaped caisson of iron that