eshift which seemed to have
gotten into the spirits of the ship's company and to have drawn them
together.

"Now I'll take you down," said the butcher, "and show you the
store-rooms and refrigerators--you'll be running up and down these
steps a good part of the time."

They were no steps, but an iron ladder leading down from the butcher's
apartment to a dark passage, where he turned on an electric light.

"Now, these three doors," he said, "are to the three store-rooms--one,
two, three."

Tom followed him into one of the rooms. It was large and delightfully
cool and immaculately clean. All around were rows of shelves with screen
doors before them, and here were stored canned goods--thousands upon
thousands of cans, Tom would have said.

"You won't touch anything in here," his superior told him. "None of this
will be used before the return trip--maybe not then. Come in here."

Tom followed him through a passage from this room into another exactly
like it. Along the passage were great ice box doors. "Cold storage," his
superior observed. "You won't have to go in there much."

"Now here's where you'll get your stuff. It's all alphabetical; if you
want tomatoes, go to T; if you want salmon--S. Just like a dictionary.
If I send you down for thirty pounds of salmon, that doesn't mean thirty
cans--see?"

"Yes, sir," said Tom.

"Make up your thirty pounds out of the biggest cans--a twenty and a ten.
There's your opener," he added, pointing to a rather complicated
mechanical can-opener fastened to the bulkhead. "Open everything before
you bring it up."

"Yes, sir."

He led Tom from one place to another, initiating him in the use of the
chopping machine, the slicing machine, etc. "You won't find things very
heavy this trip," he said; "but next trip we'll be feeding five
thousand, maybe. Now's the time to go to school and learn.--Here's the
keys; you must always keep these places locked," he added, as he himself
locked one of the doors for Tom. "They were just left open while they
were being stocked. Now we'll go up."

That very night, when the great city was asleep and the busy wharves
along the waterfront were, for the night's brief interval, dark and
lonesome, two tug-boats, like a pair of sturdy little Davids, sidled up
to the great steel Goliath and slowly she moved out into midstream and
turned her towering prow toward where the Goddess of Liberty held aloft
her beckoning light in the vast darkness.

And To