There we met many an afternoon to throw out our lines, or play leap-frog among the rusty cannon.  They were famous fellows in our eyes.  What a racket they had made in the heyday of their unchastened youth!  What stories they might tell now, if their puffy metallic lips could only speak!  Once they were lively talkers enough; but there the grim sea-dogs lay, silent and forlorn in spite of all their former growlings.

They always seemed to me like a lot of venerable disabled tars, stretched out on a lawn in front of a hospital, gazing seaward, and mutely lamenting their lost youth.

But once more they were destined to lift up their dolorous voices—­once more ere they keeled over and lay speechless for all time.  And this is how it befell.

Jack Harris, Charley Marden, Harry Blake, and myself were fishing off the wharf one afternoon, when a thought flashed upon me like an inspiration.

“I say, boys!” I cried, hauling in my line hand over hand, “I’ve got something!”

“What does it pull like, youngster?” asked Harris, looking down at the taut line and expecting to see a big perch at least.

“O, nothing in the fish way,” I returned, laughing; “it’s about the old guns.”

“What about them?”

“I was thinking what jolly fun it would be to set one of the old sogers on his legs and serve him out a ration of gunpowder.”

Up came the three lines in a jiffy.  An enterprise better suited to the disposition of my companions could not have been proposed.

In a short time we had one of the smaller cannon over on its back and were busy scraping the green rust from the touch-hole.  The mould had spiked the gun so effectually, that for a while we fancied we should have to give up our attempt to resuscitate the old soger.

“A long gimlet would clear it out,” said Charley Marden, “if we only had one.”

I looked to see if Sailor Ben’s flag was flying at the cabin door, for he always took in the colors when he went off fishing.

“When you want to know if the Admiral’s aboard, jest cast an eye to the buntin’, my hearties,” says Sailor Ben.

Sometimes in a jocose mood he called himself the Admiral, and I am sure he deserved to be one.  The Admiral’s flag was flying, and I soon procured a gimlet from his carefully kept tool-chest.

Before long we had the gun in working order.  A newspaper lashed to the end of a lath served as a swab to dust out the bore.  Jack Harris blew through the touch-hole and pronounced all clear.

Seeing our task accomplished so easily, we turned our attention to the other guns, which lay in all sorts of postures in the rank grass.  Borrowing a rope from Sailor Ben, we managed with immense labor to drag the heavy pieces into position and place a brick under each muzzle to give it the proper elevation.  When we beheld them all in a row, like a regular battery, we simultaneously conceived an idea, the magnitude of which struck us dumb for a moment.