Let us now return to Paul Jones. There were five hundred tons of public stores still at L’Orient to be shipped to the United States. The Ariel, which was in port preparing to sail, could afford additional room for but about one hundred tons. There were thus four hundred tons to be provided for. The Serapis, which Paul Jones had so heroically captured, was one of the finest and most strongly built war-ships in the British navy. The king had just purchased the prize for a sum amounting to about forty thousand dollars. As France was certainly indebted to an American commodore for his valuable prize, and as France was in alliance with America, and as the cause of the two countries was, in some respects, a common cause, France wishing to resist the intolerable tyranny of England on the seas, Jones made the very reasonable suggestion to Dr. Franklin, that he should obtain the loan of the Serapis, to accompany the Ariel in conveying these stores across the Atlantic. Upon their arrival in America, the two ships, as he thought, might inflict very serious damage on the common enemy. Franklin, deserted by his colleague Lee, mortified by the flight of Landais with the Alliance, and embarrassed for want of money, was in a state of great perplexity. Through irregularity of the mails he had not received Commodore Jones’s letter of the 21st of June, giving him the particulars of the departure of the Alliance. He had, however, received his letter of the 27th, proposing the loan of the Serapis. Philosopher as he was, he could not conceal the perplexities which annoyed him. He wrote: “I only knew, by other means, that the Alliance is gone out of the port; and that you are not likely to recover, and have relinquished the command of her. So that affair is over. And now the business is, to get the goods out as well as we can. I am perfectly bewildered with the different schemes that have been proposed to me for this purpose. Mr. Williams was for purchasing ships. I told him I had not the money; but he still urges it. You and Mr. Ross proposed borrowing the Ariel. I joined in the application for that ship. We obtained her. She was to convey all that the Alliance could not take. “Now you find her insufficient. An additional ship has already been asked and could not be obtained. I think therefore that it will be best that you take as much into the Ariel as you can, and depart with it. For the rest I must apply to the government to contrive some means of transporting it in their own ships. This is my present opinion. When I have once got rid of this business, no consideration shall tempt me to meddle again with such matters, as I never understood them.”