On Board the Transport
Florence Luckenbach.
Still opposite the
Statue of Liberty.
Things have gone e from bad to worse. Even the old Statue of Liberty, which I was so glad to see two days ago, seems to look at me and say, "I'm liberty, all right, but you can't get near me." An immigrant couldn't feel as sore as I do if he were sent back to Europe. For there's nothing wrong with me; they don't need me so much that they couldn't do without me. It's simply that I signed up in St. Nazaire and now they can keep me as long as they want. They have been working two and a half days unloading the shells, and they are not through yet. A gang of longshoremen are doing the work and one of them to whom I gave a sandwich at lunch-time told me they were getting a dollar an hour for this overtime work. He said they made eight or ten dollars a day, on a good job like this.
I don't know when we will get into Hoboken now. Yesterday the captain promised me Wednesday for sure, but now they say we must go into drydock in the Erie basin and have a new propeller put on.
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