“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.
“Finally, he considered all preliminary difficulties overcome, and began a siege of Cramps’ shipyard by regular approaches. Finding it impregnable to front attack, he resolved to flank it. This he accomplished by taking possession of an adjoining lumber yard in the night-time. Early in the morning he entered the fortress by its sally-port. Success was in his grasp,—almost. It glittered, then it glimmered, then it fizzled out. There was one peculiarity he couldn’t overcome. That was his remarkable resemblance in form and figure to ‘Punch’s’ standard cartoon of ‘John Bull.’ He could smoke a short, black pipe with the bowl turned down equal to the most Corkonian Irishman in Fishtown. He could also fairly imitate that peculiar accent produced by filtering conversation through the teeth, commonly known as the brogue, particularly when the conversation was diluted with a mouthful of Irish whiskey. But he couldn’t escape his shape. One of the Russian officers on duty at Cramps’, with that keenness characteristic of Napoleon’s ‘scratched Tartar,’ penetrated all his disguises. Then he was ignominiously ejected by one of those decrepit men who, when they get too old to build ships, are usually employed by Cramps’ as watchmen. _Sic transit gloria mundi._ Exit Gore-Jones. But he will remain with us. He will hold his job. He deserves to. He has done what no American has ever been able to do since the collapse of the Rebellion. He has discovered a navy—an actual, real, live navy—in the United States. The fact that it is a Russian navy and not an American one, humiliating as it may be to us, is a huge feather in the cap to him. We hasten to doff our editorial chapeau to Gore-Jones. We are confident he will get his star. We fervently hope he may get also the garter.”