“Well, every basket will be counted, and they’re fastened up particular, so they can tell in a minute if they’ve been tampered with; and neither must you draw the corks if you could get the basket open.  I suppose ye may have seen champagne, how it’s all wired and waxed.  Now, they take a clean tub, them fellows do, and just shake the basket and jounce it up and down till they break the bottles and let the wine drain out; then they take it down in the hold and put it back with the rest, and when the cargo is delivered there’s only one or two whole bottles in that basket, and there’s a dreadful fuss about its being stowed so foolish.”  The captain told this with an air of great satisfaction, but we did not show the least suspicion that he might have assisted at some such festivity.

“Then they have a way of breaking into a cask.  It won’t do to start the bung, and it won’t do to bore a hole where it can be seen, but they’re up to that:  they slip back one of the end hoops and bore two holes underneath it, one for the air to go in and one for the liquor to come out, and after they get all out they want they put in some spigots and cut them down close to the stave, knock back the hoop again, and there ye are, all trig.”

“I never should have thought of it,” said Kate, admiringly.

“There isn’t nothing,” Cap’n Sands went on, “that’ll hender some masters from cheating the owners a little.  Get them off in a foreign port, and there’s nobody to watch, and they most of them have a feeling that they ain’t getting full pay, and they’ll charge things to the ship that she never seen nor heard of.  There were two shipmasters that sailed out of Salem.  I heard one of ’em tell the story.  They had both come into port from Liverpool nigh the same time, and one of ’em, he was dressed up in a handsome suit of clothes, and the other looked kind of poverty-struck.  ‘Where did you get them clothes?’ says he.  ‘Why, to Liverpool,’ says the other; ’you don’t mean to say you come away without none, cheap as cloth was there?’ ‘Why, yes,’ says the other cap’n,—­’I can’t afford to wear such clothes as those be, and I don’t see how you can, either.’  ’Charge ‘em to the ship, bless ye; the owners expect it.’

“So the next v’y’ge the poor cap’n he had a nice rig for himself made to the best tailor’s in Bristol, and charged it, say ten pounds, in the ship’s account; and when he came home the ship’s husband he was looking over the papers, and ‘What’s this?’ says he, ’how come the ship to run up a tailor’s bill?’ ‘Why, them’s mine,’ says the cap’n, very meaching.  ‘I understood that there wouldn’t be no objection made.’  ’Well, you made a mistake,’ says the other, laughing; ’guess I’d better scratch this out.’  And it wasn’t long before the cap’n met the one who had put him up to doing it, and he give him a blowing up for getting him into such a fix.  ‘Land sakes alive!’ says he, ’were you fool enough to set it down in the account?  Why, I put mine in, so many bolts of Russia duck.’”