“Despairing of the navy-yards, Gore-Jones turned his attention to places where merchant-ships were constructed. He heard that the Cramps, of Philadelphia, were building something that did not look merchant-like. He resolved to see it. Incidentally, he had heard rumors that the queer craft at Cramps’ was being paid for along by instalments of Russian money. “Trouble was brewing between Russia and England. Aha! At last! Gore-Jones had struck it rich. Let him unearth this foul conspiracy to imitate in 1879 the pious example England had set with the ‘Alabama’ in 1863, and he would surely get a star. He might even get a garter. “But how? Cramp had views of his own as to private property. He was not under diplomatic jurisdiction, as were the navy-yards. In fact, the sign was out at Cramps’, ‘No English need apply!’ This, however, was rather incentive than obstacle to Gore-Jones. He needn’t be English. Nature had endowed him with an assortment of mental and bodily peculiarities, mostly bodily, that adapted him to almost any nationality. He resolved to be an Irishman. He at once began an arduous practice of the brogue. First he had to get rid of the cockney drawl which is enjoined by regulation in the English navy. Demosthenes is said to have overcome a tendency to stutter by orating with his mouth full of pebbles. Gore-Jones got rid of the regulation cockney drawl of the English navy by talking with his mouth full of Irish whiskey.