sides of the big ship.
Some went in one way, some another. They did not shoot. They fought
with swords and pikes, or short spears.

Soon they drove the pirates to one side of the ship. Then they could
hear the pirates jumping over into the water. In a few minutes the
pirates had all gone.

But the Americans could not stay long. They must burn the ship before
the pirates on the shore should find out what they were doing.

They had brought a lot of kin-dling on the ketch. They built fires in
all parts of the ship. The fire ran so fast, that some of the men had
trouble to get off the ship.

When the Americans got back on the ketch, they could not untie the
rope that held the ketch to the ship. The big ship was bursting into
flames. The ketch would soon take fire.

They took swords and hacked the big rope in two. Then they pushed hard
to get away from the fire. The ketch began to move. The sailors took
the large oars and rowed. They were soon safe from the fire.

All this they had done without any noise. But, now that they had got
away, they looked back. The fire was shooting up toward the sky. The
men stopped rowing, and they gave three cheers. They were so glad,
that they could not help it.

By this time the pirates on shore had waked up. They began to fire
great cannon balls at the little ketch. One of the balls went through
her sails. Ah! how the sailors rowed!

The whole sky was now lighted up by the fire. The pirates' cannons
were thundering. The cannon balls were splashing the water all round
the ketch. But the Americans got away. At last they were safe in their
own ships.

STORIES ABOUT JEFFERSON.

Thomas Jef-fer-son was one of the great men of the Revolution. He was
not a soldier. He was not a great speaker. But he was a great thinker.
And he was a great writer.

He wrote a paper that was the very beginning of the United States. It
was a paper that said that we would be free from England, and be a
coun-try by our-selves. We call that paper the Dec-la-ra-tion of
In-de-pend-ence.

When he was a boy, Jef-fer-son was fond of boyish plays. But when he
was tired of play, he took up a book. It pleased him to learn things.
From the time when he was a boy he never sat down to rest without
a book.

At school he learned what other boys did. But the dif-fer-ence between
him and most other boys was this: he did not stop with knowing just
what the other boys knew. Most boys want to learn what other boys
l