"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.'"

Captain Sands seemed to enjoy this reminiscence, and to our