“No, they don’t!” cried Jo, aside.
“Having taken the pirate captain prisoner, sailed slap over the schooner, whose decks were piled with dead, and whose lee-scuppers ran blood, for the order had been ‘Cutlasses, and die hard!’ ‘Bosen’s mate, take a bight of the flying-jib sheet, and start this villain if he don’t confess his sins double quick,’ said the British captain. The Portuguese held his tongue like a brick, and walked the plank, while the jolly tars cheered like mad. But the sly dog dived, came up under the man-of-war, scuttled her, and down she went, with all sail set, ‘To the bottom of the sea, sea, sea,’ where—”
“Oh, gracious! what shall I say?” cried Sallie, as Fred ended his rigmarole, in which he had jumbled together, pell-mell, nautical phrases and facts, out of one of his favorite books. “Well they went to the bottom, and a nice mermaid welcomed them, but was much grieved on finding the box of headless knights, and kindly pickled them in brine, hoping to discover the mystery about them; for, being a woman, she was curious. By and by a diver came down, and the mermaid said, ‘I’ll give you this box of pearls if you can take it up;’ for she wanted to restore the poor things to life, and couldn’t raise the heavy load herself. So the diver hoisted it up, and was much disappointed, on opening it, to find no pearls. He left it in a great lonely field, where it was found by a—”
“Little goose-girl, who kept a hundred fat geese in the field,” said Amy, when Sallie’s invention gave out. “The little girl was sorry for them, and asked an old woman what she should do to help them. ‘Your geese will tell you, they know everything,’ said the old woman. So she asked what she should use for new heads, since the old ones were lost, and all the geese opened their hundred mouths and screamed—”
“ ‘Cabbages!’ ” continued Laurie promptly. “ ‘Just the thing,’ said the girl, and ran to get twelve fine ones from her garden. She put them on,