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