MAKING READY FOR PEACE.

Globe, Volume IX, Issue 1287, 4 May 1878, Page 3

MAKING READY FOR PEACE.

Three thousand portable horse boxes, says an exchange, for temporary stabling have been put out to contract, and a considerable part of the order has been sublet to a firm at Woolwich. There is already a storehouse in the dockyard, filled with similar fittings adapted for transport ships, the several parts stacked in thousands together, but so contrived as to be capable of immediate adjustment for use. Other contracts of an extensive character have also been isssued, the authorities availing themselves freely in this way of the parliamentary grant before the financial year expires. All orders are, therefore, to be executed by March 31st, and two firms alone have undertaken to supply the Royal Laboratory Department, on or before that date, with mahogany to the value of £41,000. Mahogany is largely used by the laboratory in the manufacture of ammunition boxes and similar purposes, being the most suitable material in many respects, especially in its power of withstanding variations of climate. Bales containing upwards of a thousand garments for butchers and bakers of the Army Service Corps have been ehipped for Malta.

The order for these articles was sent to the Army Clothing Store, at Pimlico, by telegraph on the previous day, and they were cut out, made up, and dispatched within twenty-four hours, men and women working all night upon them. The various which have been put forward to furnish the needed overbank carriage for the siege train are for the moment put aside in favor of a simple and ready plan of raising the gun to the edge of the 6ft. parapet on a superstructure erected upon the ordinary travelling carriage. Work in the carriage department at Woolwich is at high pressure, many of the men working continuously two days and a night. The brass founders and shellmakers in the laboratory and the sawyers and wheelers in carriage department are the hardest driven. Workmen are still being taken on daily, but the supply is greater than the demand, and the gates of the Arsenal are besieged every morning by 2000 or 3000 persons seeking employ ment. Stores are accumulating on the wharf of the Royal Arsenal as fast as they are shipped away. A vast number of projectiles for 9-pounder field and naval guns arc being put on board the Bonnie Kate for Malta, and a number of Harvey’s port and starboard torpedoes, with their attendant buoys and other gear, are going out to the fleet.