a Venetian galleass. Once under way, and especially when the Captain and the First Mate assisted with poles from the stern, she moved at a surprisingly brisk rate of speed, although it did take a power of churning and straining to get her started.
"But won't she be a peach for rammin'!" cried her Captain, joyously, as he watched her loggy side crush an orange-crate against a boom-end.
It was only the pirates themselves who ever knew just what this transformation entailed. What sly dismantling of fences and chicken-coops! What purloining of screws and nails and scantlings and odds and ends of boards. What nail-bereft woodsheds that leaned awry; what fences that stood suddenly bare and skeleton-like; what sidewalks that tripped you up quite unexpectedly, because of an unwholesome absence of spikes; what soulless rending of good linen sheets for the making of sails, what strange disappearings of clothes-lines for the manufacture of rigging! And what sawing and hammering and pounding and blistering of hands and bruising of thumbs, before it was all brought about!
