Chance Encounter With Underwater Damsel Produces Palpitating Pulse in Veteran Diver

"She got me down--trying to embrace me twenty feet below the surface. I didn't have anything to do with it, honest. I was groping about the bottom once when, interrupted by a tap on my shoulder. I turned about prepared to grasp a playful fellow-diver--and clasped a slimy, clammy arm--the sodden corpse of a dead woman."

Fred Wallace, veteran diver, who feels light-headed without his 140 pounds of gear, told about another victim he pulled up from Davy Jones' hideout.

"Do you remember that girl whose car skidded off into the Charles last December and fell through the ice in front of the Cambridge Boat House? Well, I fished her out. Talk about people who break the ice to get a cold swim, they wouldn't if they had to do any winter underwater prowling. I had to take four trips down through the ice before I could get that woman out. I'm planning to get the car in the spring when that river warms up.

"We never walk down there," the experienced bottom-saunterer continued. "I shove myself around on my stomach in ever widening circles--my technique would shame the most adroit pollywog. The clouds of mud I stir up make using a light about as useful as trying to shine it through a thick London fog. You can't see anything and if you're not careful to keep your suit full of air, you will squash up into your helmet."

Wallace has a tender spot in his heart for honey-mooners since he rescued a satchel of jewelry, a will, a baby carriage, and other personal effects for a motoring couple who were too wrapped up in themselves to notice a river in front of them.