Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/95

 team, usually in the proportion of 40 per cent to the riveter, 30 per cent to the backer-up and 15 per cent each to heater and passer. Many expert riveters earn as much as $60 a week.

We crawled under the bottom of the Schoodic which is to be launched tomorrow morning. She had just had her first coat of paint, and her tall, graceful bow loomed high in air on the slanting shipway. Mr. White, the engineer in charge of the launchings, was kind enough to show me the ingenious system of shores, packing and "sandjacks" which holds up the hull on the ways and the special Hog Island grease which is used to ease the ship's slide toward the water. The cunning manipulation by which the ship's great weight is thrown off the shores onto the "sandjacks," and then lowered by removing the sand from these iron boxes, would require an essay in itself. Not one of Hog Island's launchings—and they have had nineteen—has been marred by any hitch. Mr. White told me that his gang of 120 men can put through a launching in two hours and a half from the time they first begin work.

In the training school, where about 200 men are learning the various shipbuilding trades, 92 per cent of the pupils are former soldiers and sailors. They are all men of powerful physique, but many of them were in sedentary clerical occupations before the war. Many a man who has served in the army has no taste now to re-enter a trade that will keep him indoors eight or ten hours a day.