Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/92

 Fitz and I stood on the bridge of the Saluda, one of the eleven steamers now getting their finishing touches at the seven huge piers, one had a vision of the Island as it was during that first winter. Engineers and laborers wrestled with frozen swamp and blizzard snows. Workmen were brought from Philadelphia day by day, roped in like sardines in open trucks, arriving numbed to the bone. Perhaps some day there will come some poet great enough to tell the drama of Hog Island as it ought to be told. The men who gritted their teeth and put it through will never tell. They are of the old stalwart breed that works with its hands. As they talk you can divine something of what they endured.

I don't believe there is a more triumphant place on earth than Hog Island these days. Ships are the most expressive creatures of men's hands, and as I stood with Fitz on the bridge of the Saluda and looked out through a driving rain on the comely gray hulls of those 7500-ton cargo carriers, it was hard to resist the thought that each of them had a soul of her own and was partaking in the general exultation. Eight ships now going about their business on the world's waters, eleven at the outfitting piers getting ready to smell blue water, and fifty on the ways—the Island is launching one every Saturday—that is the record. Smoke was drifting from the funnels of several, whose turbine engines were getting their tuning up.

These thousand-foot piers, each of which can