* * * * * They are hunting, in Paris, for the bones of John Paul Jones, the first and greatest sea captain who ever flew the Stars and Stripes from the masthead of a battleship, and “held the ocean lists against the world in mail.” Congress gives $35,000 to find the bones, and of course they will be found—not those of the original Jones, perhaps, but a good enough lot of bones for that amount of money. * * * * * Had Gouverneur Morris, the American Minister to France, done his duty at the time of Paul Jones’s death, by giving him a respectable funeral and a modest tombstone, the people of this country would not now be taxed $35,000 to find the hero’s grave. * * * * * When John Paul Jones—old, broken and poor—lay dying in Paris, our high-toned Minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, sat feasting with aristocratic company, and that high-toned Minister failed to mark the grave of a man who with Nelson’s chances might have done even more than Nelson on the sea. His grave was made in an obscure churchyard, his resting-place neglected and forgotten, covered with accumulated deposits, and built over with houses. Those who seek the bones are sinking holes seventeen feet deep, in the search. Of course, they will find the body of Commodore Jones. That is what they are hunting for. Therefore, they will find it. But whether the dust they bring back to America will be that of _our_ Paul Jones no mortal will ever know. * * * * * In his Diary, Gouverneur Morris relates: “A message from Paul Jones that he is dying. “I go thither and make his will.... Send for a Notary, _and leave him struggling with his enemy_.” The American Minister to France left Paul Jones struggling with death! Left him alone with a French Notary, and went away. To do what? To “dine with Lord Gower and Lady Sutherland”! The American Minister knew that Paul Jones was dying, for he says so. After the dinner with the English Lord and Lady, does the American Minister hasten back to the bedside of the fellow-countryman whom he had left “struggling with his enemy”? By no means. He goes to the Louvre to look at the paintings; and then takes Talleyrand’s mistress with him to Jones’s lodging. “But he is dead—_not yet cold_.” And this is all that Gouverneur Morris’s Diary records of Paul Jones’s death, until the indignation aroused in America by his shocking lack of attention to the dying hero had thrown him upon the defensive. * * * * * Who paid the burial expenses of Paul Jones? A Frenchman claims that he did it. Morris, in his Diary, certainly seeks to make the impression that he paid them out of Jones’s estate. The hero left sufficient property for the purpose, as can easily be shown. Further than that we are left in doubt.