Four days of listless waiting go by, and Captain Paul Jones again finds himself and Mr. Morris closeted with General Washington.

“Captain Jones,” says the latter, speaking with a kindly gravity, “Mr. Morris and I have so pushed your affairs with the Marine Committee that to-morrow Congress will pass a double resolution, adopting a new flag, the stars and stripes, and appointing you to command the Ranger.”

“The Ranger!” exclaims Captain Paul Jones, beginning to glow. “Thanks, General; a thousand thanks! And to you also, Mr. Morris, whom I shall never forget! The Ranger! I know her! She is being sparred and rigged at Portsmouth! New, three hundred tons; a beauty, too, they tell me! Gentlemen, I am off at once to Portsmouth! I must see to stepping her masts and mounting her batteries myself.”

Captain Paul Jones, all eagerness, is on his feet, and even the wise, age-cold Mr. Morris begins to catch his fire.

“Right!” cries Mr. Morris; “you shall start to-morrow!”

“Captain Jones,” interrupts the General, laying a large detaining hand on the other’s arm, “you will go to Portsmouth and look after your ship. Also, while your destination is France, you must wait for orders to sail. I may have weighty despatches for the French King—news that will shake Europe.”

June is as cool in Portsmouth as it is in Philadelphia. Cooler; for the New Hampshire breeze has in it the chill smell of those snows that lie unmelted in the mountains. Captain Paul Jones comes unannounced, eyes dancing like those of a child with a new toy, and seeks the wharf where the __Ranger__ is being fitted to her spars. From a convenient coign he looks the Ranger over, and evinces a master’s appreciation.

“Nose sharp! Plenty of dead-rise! Lean lines!” he murmurs. “With the wind anywhere abaft the beam, she should race like a greyhound! All, she’s a beauty, fit to warm the cockles of a sailor’s heart! See to the sheer of her!—as delicate as the lines of a woman’s arm!”

Up comes a sturdy figure with an air of command, an officer’s hat on his head, a ship-carpenter’s adz in his hand.

“This is Captain Jones?”

“Captain Paul Jones, sir.”

“Pardon me for not first giving my name. I’m Elijah Hall, who is to sail second officer with you in yon Ranger.”

Captain Paul Jones and Lieutenant Hall fall into instant and profound confab of a deeply nautical complexion, a confab quite beyond a landsman’s comprehension, wherein such phrases as “flush-decks,” “short poop-deck,” “bilges,” “futtocks,” and “knees” abound, and are reeled off as though their use gives our two ship-enthusiasts unbridled satisfaction. At last Lieutenant Hall remarks, pointing to three long sticks:

“There’re her masts, sir. They were taken out of a four-hundred-ton Indiaman, and are too long for a three-hundred-ton ship like the Ranger. I was thinking I’d cut’em off four feet in the caps.”

“That would be a sin!” exclaims Captain Paul Jones, voice almost religious in its fervent zeal. “Three as fine pieces of pine as ever came out of Norway, too! I’d be afraid to cut’em, Mr. Hall; it would give the ship bad luck. I’ll tell you what! Fid them four feet lower in the hounds; it will amount to the same thing, and at the same time save the sticks.”

Captain Paul Jones goes at the congenial task of fitting out the Ranger with his usual day-and-night energy. When he finds her over-sparred, with her masts too long, he still refuses to cut them down, but shortens yard and bowsprit, jib-boom and spankerboom. He doesn’t like the Marine Committee’s armament of twenty six-pounders, and proceeds to mount four six-pounders and fourteen long nines.

“One nine-pounder is equal to two six-pounders,” says Captain Paul Jones; “and, since it’s I who must put to sea in the Ranger, and not the Marine Committee, nine-ponnders I’ll have, and say no more about it.”

The New Hampshire girls, on the Fourth of July, come down to the Ranger, and present Captain Paul Jones a flag—red, white, and blue—quilted of cloth ravished from their virgin petticoats. The gallant mariner makes the New Hampshire girls a speech.



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“That flag,” cries he, “that flag and I, as captain of the Ranger, were born on the same day. We are twins. We shall not be parted life or death; we shall float together or sink together!”

These brave words, in the long run, find amendment. The petticoat flag of the pretty New Hampshire girls is the flag which, two years later, flies from the Richard’s indomitable peak when Captain Paul Jones cuts down the gallant Pierson and his Serapis. After that fight off Scarborough Head, Captain Paul Jones writes to the pretty New Hampshire girls—for he ever remembers the ladies—recounting the last destiny of their petticoat ensign. He is telling of the Richard’s death throes, as viewed from the blood-slippery decks of the conquered Serapis:

“No one was now left aboard the Richard but my dead. To them I gave the good old ship to be their coffin; in her they found a sublime sepulcher. She rolled heavily in the swell, her gun-deck awash to the port-sills, settled slowly by the head, and sank from sight. The ensign gaff, shot away in the action, had been fished and put in place; and there your flag was left flying when we abandoned her. As she went down by the head, her taffrail rose for a moment; and so the last that mortal eye ever saw of the gallant Richard was your unconquered ensign. I couldn’t strip it from the brave old ship in her last agony; nor cou............