Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/149

 was the new destroyer Tattnall, just taking on her equipment—coils of yellow, creaky rope; fenders, cases of electric bulbs, galvanized buckets, cases of heavy sea boots. It was a tale of adventure just to study her lean, crisp, flaring bow with its concave curves, her four slender funnels, her tall glass-screened bridge, the sternward slant of her hull. Even in the mild swell and swing of Delaware water she rode daintily as a yacht, lifted and caressed by the flow and wash of the water. How she must leap and sway in the full tumble of open seas. She seemed an adorable toy. Who would not go to war, with such delicious playthings to covet and care for! And beside her on the pier, lay a clumsier and grimmer-seeming engine. Three great gun-mounts for Admiral Plunkett's naval railroad battery, that carried the fourteen-inch guns that dropped shells into Metz from twenty-eight miles away. On one of these huge steel caissons I saw that some member of the A. E. F. had scratched his doleful message: George W. Moller, a soldier of St. Nazaire, France, who wishes to go home toot sweet.

The lively little tug Betty curtsied up to the pier and took us on board. Harry Jones, her friendly skipper, steamed us down past the green mounds of old Fort Mifflin, past the long tangle of Hog Island's shipways and the wet-basins where the Scantic, the Pipestone County and other of Hog Island's prides were lying, one of them kicking up a white smother with her propeller in some engine