Page:The Wireless Operator with the U.S. Coast Guard.djvu/137

 New York Bay. Nevertheless, it interested Henry deeply.

When the Iroquois at last lay snug in her dock in the Boston Navy Yard, Henry was almost spellbound. Never had he dreamed of seeing such a collection of vessels. Immediately across the pier from the Iroquois he saw a ship standing high in air, with her keel not only out of water, but almost at the level of the pier itself. Henry had never seen anything like this before, and his astonishment was hardly lessened when the captain told him that this was the marine railway on which ships were hauled out of water, and that the vessel on the railway was the Coast Guard cutter, Oneida. Her bottom was being scraped and painted, and she was getting some new rivets in her plates.

But if Henry was astonished to see a ship high up in the air, he was hardly less amazed to see another far down in the bowels of the earth, for on the other side of the Iroquois, at no great distance, a little lean, gray boat, was propped upright in the centre of a great hole that had been dug in the earth. She was deep down. Henry judged her keel must be a full thirty feet below the level of the surrounding earth. There was no water in the hole, and workmen were busy all about the little ship. As Henry soon discovered, this boat was in one of the Navy Yard dry docks.