After a while Jones was put in command of the Bon Homme Richard, a larger vessel than the Ranger, but she flew the same little silken flag. Off Flamborough Head he came up with the British Serapis. After two hours of fighting, Captain Pearson of the Serapis shouted, in a moment's lull, "Have you struck your colors yet?" "I haven't yet begun to fight," was Jones's reply. The two ships were lashed together, guns burst, cartridges exploded, wide gaps were torn out of the sides of both vessels. "Have you struck?" cried the British captain. "No!" thundered Paul Jones. At last the Serapis yielded; but the Bon Homme Richard was fast sinking. Captain Jones left her and took possession of the Serapis. The American vessel rolled and lurched and pitched and plunged. The little silken flag that had never been conquered waved in the morning breeze for the last time, and then went down, "flying on the ship that conquered and captured the ship that sank her." When Paul Jones returned to America he met one of the young girls who had given him the flag. He told her how eagerly he had longed to give it back into the hands of those who had given it to him four years earlier. "But, Miss Mary," he said, "I couldn't bear to strip it from the poor old ship in her last agony, nor could I deny to my dead on her decks, who had given their lives to keep it flying, the glory of taking it with them." In his journal he wrote eloquently and almost as simply:-- No one was now left aboard the Richard but her dead. To them I gave the good old ship for their coffin, and in her they found a sublime sepulcher. She rolled heavily in the long swell, her gun-deck awash to the port-sills, settled slowly by the head, and sank peacefully in about forty fathoms. The ensign-gaff, shot away in action, had been fished and put in place, soon after firing ceased, and our torn and tattered flag was left flying when we abandoned her. As she plunged down by the head at the last, her taffrail momentarily rose in the air; so the very last vestige mortal eyes ever saw of the Bon Homme Richard was the defiant waving of her unconquered and unstricken flag as she went down. And as I had given them the good old ship for their sepulcher, I now bequeathed to my immortal dead the flag they had so desperately defended, for their winding sheet! This is the story of the Portsmouth flag. At first its truth was accepted without a doubt; then it was seriously questioned. Within the last few years, new evidence in the shape of family tradition has strengthened its position. CHAPTER VIII FLAGS ONE WOULD HAVE LIKED TO SEE