me just what she was to
do. He gave the signal to the sawyers. The snarl of the teeth in the
holding-blocks was lost in the noise of the band. The great whistle on
the fabricating-plant split the air. The moving-picture camera-men
cranked their machines. The last inches of the timbers that held the
ship ashore were gnawed through. The sawyers said they could feel the
ship straining. She wanted to get to her sea. They loved her for it.

Suddenly she was "sawed off." She was moving. The rigid mountain was
an avalanche of steel departing down a wooden hill.

Mamise stared, gasped, paralyzed with launch-fright. Davidge nudged
her. She hurled the bottle at the vanishing keel. It broke with a loud
report. The wine splashed everywhichway. Some of it spattered Mamise's
new gown.

Her muscles went to work in womanly fashion to brush off the stain.

When she looked up, ashamed of her homely misbehavior, she cried:

"O Lord! I forgot to say, 'I christen thee _Mamise_.'"

"Say it now," said Davidge.

She shouted the words down the channel opening like an abyss as the
vast hulk diminished toward the river. Far below she could see the
water leap back from the shock of the new-comer. Great, circling
ripples retreated outward. Waves fought and threw up bouquets of
spume.

The chute smoked with the heat of the ship's passage and a white cloud
of steam flew up and followed her into the river.

She was launched, beautifully, perfectly. She sailed level. She was
water-borne.

People were cheering, the band was pounding all out of time, every eye
following the ship, the leader forgetting to lead.

Mamise wept and Davidge's eyes were wet. Something surged in him like
the throe of the river where the ship went in. It was good to have
built a good ship.

Mamise wrung his hand. She would have kissed him, but she remembered
in time. The camera caught the impulse. People laughed at that in the
movie theaters. People cheered in distant cities as they assisted
weeks after in the debut of _Mamise_.

The movies took the people everywhere on magic carpets. Yet there were
curious people who bewailed them as inartistic!

Mamise's little body and her little soul were almost blasted by the
enormity of her emotions. The ship was like a child too big for its
mother, and the ending of the long travail left her wrecked.

She tried to enter into the hilarity of the guests, but she was filled
with awe and prostrate as if a god had passed by.