Four ships—the Alfred, Captain Saltonstall, in the van, with Commodore Hopkins in command of the squadron—sail away on a rainy February day. They clear Cape Henlopen, and turn their untried prows south by east half south. The fell purpose of Commodore Hopkins is to harry the Bahamas.

It will be nowhere written that Commodore Hopkins, in his designs upon the Bahamas, in any degree succeeds. Eight weeks later, the four ships come scudding into New London with the fear of death in their hearts. An English sloop of war darted upon them, they say, off the eastern end of Long Island, and they escaped by the paint on their planks.

Lieutenant Paul Jones of the Alfred is afire with anger and chagrin at the miserable failure of the cruise, and goes furiously ashore, nursing a purpose of charging both Commodore Hopkins and Captain Saltonstall with every maritime offence, from sea-idiocy to cowardice. He is cooled off by older and more prudent heads. Also, Commodore Hopkins is summarily dismissed by Congress, while Captain Saltonstall takes refuge behind the broad skirts of his patron Mr. Adams. Thus, that first luckless cruise of the infant navy, conceived in ignorance and in politics brought forth, achieves its dismal finale in investigations, votes of censure, and dismissals, a situation which goes far to justify those December prophecies of Lieutenant Paul Jones, that Mr. Adams, by his selections for commodore and captains, arranged for more courts-martial than victories.

It has one excellent result, however; it teaches Congress to give Lieutenant Paul Jones the sloop Providence, and send him to sea with a command of his own. With him go his faithful blacks, Scipio and Cato; also, as “port-fire,” a red Indian of the Narragansett tribe, one Anthony Jeremiah of Martha’s Vineyard.

The little sloop—about as big as a gentleman’s yacht, she is—clears on a brilliant day in June. For weeks she ranges from Newfoundland to the Bermudas—seas sown with English ships of war. Boatswain Jack Robinson holds this converse with Polly his virtuous wife, when the Providence again gets its anchors down in friendly Yankee mud.

“And what did you do, Jack?” demands wife Polly, now she has him safe ashore.

“I’ll tell you what he—that’s the captain—does, when first we puts to sea. He’s only a leftenant—Leftenant Paul Jones; but he ought to be a captain, and so, d’ye see, my girl, I’ll call him captain. What does the captain do, says you, when once he’s afloat? As sure as you’re on my knee, Polly, no sooner be we off soundings than he passes the word for’ard for me to fetch him the cat-o’-nine-tails—me being bo’sen. Aft I tumbles, cat and all, wondering who’s to have the dozen.

“‘Chuck it overboard, Jack!’ says he, like that.

“‘Chuck what, capt’n?’ says I, giving my forelock a tug.

“‘Chuck the cat!’ says he.

“‘The cat?’ says I, being as you might say taken a-back, and wondering is it rum.

“‘Ay! the cat!’ he says. Then, looking me over with an eye like a coal, he goes on: ‘I can keep order aboard my ship without the cat. Because why; because I’m the best man aboard her,’ he says; and there you be.”

“And did the cat go overboard, Jack?”

“Overboard of course, Polly. And being nicely fitted with little knobs of lead on the nine tails of her, down to the bottom like a solid shot goes she. And so, d’ye see, we goes cruising without the cat.”

“Did you take no prizes?”

“We sunk eight, and sent eight more into Boston with prize crews aboard. Good picking, too, they was.”

“And you had no battles th............