Sullen and Gay

One of the strangest hulks shipwright ever fashioned stood in the Camden, N. J., ways: It was about to be loosed into the water.* Lest it should race across the estuary and smash into Philadelphia, a gigantic cable was stretched across the water off the New Jersey shore. Twenty airplanes careened lazily from side to side, high in air above the hulk, as if welcoming a foster-mother.

On a platform towering by the hulk's bow chatted a gay party. In the fore were Secretary and Mrs. Wilbur (TIME, Apr. 6) ; Mrs. Wilbur's sister, Mrs. Paist of Wayne, Pa., and Mr. Paist; Admirals Eberle, Moffett, Jones, Bloch, J. K. Robison and their wives; General and Mrs. Lejeune. Mrs. Wilbur's left arm was hidden beneath American Beauty roses. Her right arm grasped a beribboned bottle of Saratoga mineral water. Presently Mr. Wilbur exhorted his wife:

"Give her a good swipe." Mrs. Wilbur did. The bottle disintegrated. The hulk slid downward, waterward, insensible to her clear words:

'I christen thee Saratoga."

Automatically released from their aviary, twenty pigeons homed to the Naval Air Station at Washington, announced that the world's greatest airplane-carrying vessel was on water.

The gay christening party proceeded to lunch with the shipbuilders, where speeches were made telling how the U. S. S. Saratoga could cross the Atlantic in four days, could supply electric current for a huge city, cost $45,000,000, will carry 72 planes, is an unprecedented monster (TIME, Apr. 6).

*Only the hull is completed at present; the ship will not be in commission for a year.