"Papa, will you?" asked the lad, turning toward the Captain and raising his voice a little.
"Tell us about the doings of the navy in Revolutionary times, sir," replied Max, "as Grandma Elsie has been telling of the fights on land."
"Oh, do, Papa; won't you?" pleaded Lulu, hastening to his side, the other girls and Walter following, while Max gallantly offered to move Grandma Elsie's chair nearer to his father and Violet, which she allowed him to do, thanking him with one of her rarely sweet smiles.
The Captain, gently putting aside the two little ones who were hanging lovingly about him, saw every one seated comfortably, and near enough to hear all he might say, then resuming his own seat, began the account they had asked for of the early doings of the embryo navy of their common country.
"We had no navy at all when the Revolutionary War began," he said. "Rhode Island, the smallest State in the Union, was the first of the colonies to move in the matter of building and equipping a Continental fleet. On October 3, 1775, its delegates laid before Congress the instructions they had received to do what they could to have that work begun.
"They met with great opposition there; but John Adams was very strongly in its favour, and did for it all in his power.
"On the 5th of October, Washington was authorized to employ two armed vessels to intercept British store-ships, bound for Quebec; on the 13th, two armed vessels, of ten and of fourteen guns, were voted; and seventeen days later, two others of thirty-six guns. That was the beginning of our navy; and it was very necessary we should have one to protect our seaport towns and destroy the English ships sent against us, also to make it more difficult and hazardous for them to bring over new levies of troops to deprive us of our liberties, and from using their vessels to destroy our merchantmen, and so put an end to our commerce.
"Rhode Island had bold and skilful seamen, some of whom had had something to do with British ships before the war began,--even as early as 1772.
"In that year there was a British armed schooner called the 'Gaspee,' in Narragansett Bay, sent there to enforce obnoxious British laws.
"Its officers behaved in so tyrannical a manner toward the Americans of the neighbourhood that at length they felt it quite unbearable; and one dark, stormy night in June, Capt. Abraham Whipple, a veteran sailor, with some brother seamen, went down the bay in open whale-boats, set the 'Gaspee' on fire, and burned her.
