“The queer thing about this,” he said, reflectively, “is that somebody away from here is writing him about this yacht. Perhaps they don’t mean the _Viking_. However, I believe that is the boat referred to. Well, he may be only getting advice from some one as to how to examine the yacht—how to look her over. The remark about ‘sound timbers’ sounds like that, anyway. So ho! he isn’t thinking about buying a yacht, eh?” The squire chuckled. “I’ll study this over at my leisure,” he said, as he placed the paper with the letters pasted on it carefully away in a drawer. “I’ll figure it out.” CHAPTER XII. THE SURPRISE SETS SAIL AGAIN The work on the _Surprise_ had gone on famously, though it had been a hard task. The labour of cleaning her, inside and out, had been well begun down in the Thoroughfare, but there remained still much to be done after she had been floated up into the harbour of Southport. First, the boys had brought her in on the beach, at a point a little way up the cove from the Warren cottage, where there was a break in the rocky shore, and a clean strip of sand extended back from the water’s edge. There they had raised her on blocks and shored her up so they could work to advantage. They swarmed over and in and out of her then like ants in an ant-hill, every boy lending a hand, from the Warren brothers to the campers down below. They scrubbed and scraped her, inside and out, and washed her insides with soap and hot water. Then, following Captain Sam’s advice, they built a fire on the shore and melted a kettle full of pitch and tar. When they had gone over the entire planking of the boat, setting up the nails that had slackened with the straining it had undergone, and had driven many new ones in between, Harvey, equipped with an enormous brush, and having taken up the cabin flooring, smeared the inner part of the boat’s planking with the tar and pitch, filling all the seams with it. Then they went over the entire hull on the exterior, tightening it up, scraping, sandpapering, and rubbing until their hands were blistered and their arms ached. Then came the painting of the cabin and outer hull, and the scraping and varnishing of the decks. The mast and ballast they had brought up from the Thoroughfare. The latter, cleansed of its rust and given a coating of hot coal-tar, was ready to be stowed aboard. The mast, scraped and varnished till it glistened once more, had been carefully stepped and fastened above and below. The yacht _Surprise_, with clean, shining spars, with polished, glistening decks, and with hull spotless white, was ready once more for the water. Long before they had tested their work with innumerable buckets of water thrown aboard, and had found her tight and not a leak remaining. Jack Harvey eyed the yacht admiringly, as he paused, half-way up the bank from where she stood. His companions in the day’s work had gone on ahead.