Saratoga

On Apr. 7, the world's biggest and fastest airplane-carrier will slide off the ways of the N. Y. Shipbuilding Corporation at Camden, N. J., and will be christened U. S. S. Saratoga.

For this ceremony, Mrs. Curtis D. Wilbur will leave her pots and pans* will abandon her clothes line, will travel (presumably in a parlor-car), will provide herself with a champagne-model gingerbeer bottle, will crack it upon the very front and prow of the unfinished hulk.

The new monster is 850.ft. long; will have a speed of 33 knots; is powered by steam turbines capable of generating 180,000 horsepower (nearly equal to half the entire horsepower of the Navy in 1898) ; is armed with a main battery of eight 8-inch guns; will be able to carry 72 combat, observation and bombing planes.

The sister ship, S. S. Lexington, is expected to slide from the ways soon. Both Japan and Great Britain are building craft similar, but said to be inferior in speed and power. The nominal ancestors of the Saratoga : Saratoga I, a sloop of 18 guns, was built in 1780 by John Hemphreys ol Philadelphia, who later built the frigates Constitution, Constellation, etc. On Oct. 9. 1780, she captured four British vessels. Saratoga II, which mounted 26 guns and displaced 734 tons,/- was flagship in the battle of Lake Champlain. From her Commodore MacDonough sent this despatch to Secretary of the Navy Madison: "Sir, the Almighty has been pleased to grant us a signal victory." Saratoga III, a sloop of 22 guns and 1,025 tons, was launched in 1842, suppressed slave-trade off the African coast, went to Japan with Commodore Perry in 1853, was gunnery ship at Annapolis, was sold in 1907.

Saratoga IV, built by William Cramp & Sons of Philadelphia in 1891, christened New York, was flagship of Rear Admiral Sampson in the defeat of

Spaniard Cervera off Santiago. Under her third name, Rochester, she is still of the "second line."

*When the Wilburs moved to Washington, Mrs. Wilbur asserted that she, indifferent to the social frivolities of the Capital, would continue to do her own cooking. Simultaneously, the public prints provided snapshots of Mrs. Wilbur at the gas-range, at the laundry basket.

/-The Leviathan displaces 59,597 tons.