“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. [Illustration: 0143] “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 could I deny my dead on her decks, who had given their lives to keep it flying, the glory of taking it with them. And so I parted with it; so they took it for their winding sheet.”