Hat was dressed in a splendid traveling suit of heavy brocaded stuff. She wore an enormous green-and-purple hat and carried a green bottle with red, white and blue streamers tied round its neck. Being skipper and a lady at one and the same time, she had chosen to christen the ship herself. "What's in the bottle, Hat?" sang out one of her admirers. "Wouldn't you like to know?" Hat retorted wittily. She was in high spirits. "Ain't it a waste of good stuff!" shouted another. "I guess it ain't everybody that can be trusted to christian a ship these hard times." "It ain't the last drink she will get either," a more remote voice floated up to her. "I hear she's taking rum to France from Porto Rico." Hat Tyler took a firmer grip of the bottle under its streamers, for this was the voice of Pearl Higgins. Time pressed. Already the shore gang were splitting out the keel blocks. The whole town stood at gaze. The children had been let out of school. A group of the larger ones were gathered on the after deck, ready to sing America when the ship took the water. It was a gala day. Hat felt that all eyes were centered on her, and her commands rolled along the decks like so many red-hot solid shot. The strokes of the men under her keel rang faster and faster yet. When the last block was split out from under that oaken keel it was expected that the ship would settle on the ways, that two smooth tallowed surfaces would come together, that the ship and all her five hundred tons would move the fraction of an inch, would slip, would slide, would speed stern foremost into what is called her native element. But ships are notional, and these expectations are sometimes dashed. And now Elmer and his wife, who were stationed ankle deep in that yellow sea of chips under her prow, could see the brows of the shore gang beaded with sweat, and a look of desperate hurry in the eyes of the youngster coming with the paint pot and painting the bottom of the keel as the blocks fell one by one. Well he might hurry; for sometimes the ship trips the last dozen blocks or so, and thus stepped on with all that tonnage they snap and crackle, and splinters fly in every direction. Nothing now held the ship but a single iron dog which bound the two tallowed surfaces together. One stroke of the maul knocked this away. Still the ship hung fire. "Run back and forth thwartships, you there; all you good people!" cried Hat hoarsely. "See if we can't start her that way." So the ship's launching company ran back and forth, and fore and aft, until their tongues were hanging out. Elmer nudged his wife and asked her if she remembered that night when they had danced up and down themselves at a moonlight launching. Pearl replied with a trace of acid that she had good cause to remember it. It was then that Elmer had screwed his courage to the speaking point.