The Log of the Flying Fish | Page 7

in engaging an efficient office staff; but
when it came to securing the services of foremen, mechanics, and
labourers, the unhappy German was driven almost to despair. He
advertised his wants widely, of course, and, in response to his
advertisements, the applications for employment poured in almost
literally without number. The great entrance-gates of the works were
fairly besieged, and the roadway outside blocked by the great army of
applicants, who were admitted into the presence of the professor in
gangs of twenty at a time. The professor had set out with the resolve
that he would deal as liberally with his employes as he possibly could,
consistently with justice to his client, the baronet; and with this object
he had spared no pains to ascertain the rate of wages then ruling for
such men as he wanted. With the data thus obtained he had drawn up a
scale of pay which he was prepared to offer, and beyond which he had
resolved not to go. Armed with this, he interviewed the countless
applicants as they presented themselves before him; and the result was
enough to drive to distraction even a more patient man than Herr von
Schalckenberg. The applicants proved to be, almost without exception,
trades-unionists, out on strike because their employers had declined or
had been unable to accede to the exorbitant demands of the workmen.
These workmen had in many cases been idle for months; yet they now
unhesitatingly refused employment, and refused it insolently too,
because the wages offered by the professor, though fully equal to those
paid by other employers, were less than they chose to consider
themselves entitled to. Their wives and children were, by their own
admission, naked and starving, and here was an opportunity to clothe
and feed them, yet they rejected it scornfully. And naked, starving
though the families of these wretches might be and actually were,
almost every man of them, bearing out the professor's criticism of them,
had a short dirty pipe in his mouth and smelt strongly of drink. There
were a few exceptions to this rule-- about one in every fifty applicants,

perhaps--and they were almost all non-union men, who eagerly and
thankfully accepted employment, careless of the sneers, gibes, and
threats of the others; and these proved to be, with scarcely a single
exception, steady, reliable, honest, and capable men, who soon worked
themselves into leading positions. The professor wanted about two
hundred men, and he succeeded in securing twenty; after which his
overtasked patience gave out, and in despair he obtained the remainder
from Germany.
All this took time; and it was not until nearly eight months after the
conversation in the "Migrants'" smoke-room that the professor was
actually able to commence work in the building yard. Then, however,
the operations proceeded apace. Day after day long mineral trains jolted
and clanked noisily along the siding and into the yard, where they
disgorged their loads and made way for still other trains; day after day
clumsy steam colliers hauled in alongside the yard wharf and under the
fussy steam-cranes to discharge their cargoes; and very soon the lofty
furnace chimneys began to belch forth a never-ending cloud of inky
smoke. Very soon, too, the belated wayfarer might possibly, had he
been so disposed, have obtained a chance glimpse, through accidental
chinks in the close palisading, of a long range of brilliantly lighted
buildings, wherein, if the doors happened to be inadvertently left open,
he would have witnessed huge outpourings of dazzling molten metal,
which, after being subjected to the action of certain chemicals, and
passing through divers strange processes, was passed as it solidified
through a series of powerful rolling mills, which relentlessly squeezed
and flattened it out, until it finally emerged, still glowing red with
fervent heat, in the shape of long flat symmetrically shaped sheets, or
angle-bars and girders of various sections. And, a little later on, an
inquisitive individual, could he have obtained a peep into the jealously
boarded-in building shed, might have seen a far-reaching series of light
circular ribs of glittering silver-like metal, of gradually decreasing
diameter as they spread each way from the central rib, rearing
themselves far aloft toward the ground-glass skylight which
surmounted the roof of the building. But perhaps the strangest sight of
all, could one but have gained admission into the forge to see it, was
the huge main shaft of the ship, which, after having been mercilessly

pounded and battered into shape by the giant Nasmith hammers, was
coolly seized by only a couple of men, and by them easily carried into
the machine-shop, there to receive its finishing touches in the lathe.
And so the work went on, steadily yet rapidly, until at length it so
nearly approached completion that the professor was every week