"'This!' scoffed Carl. ''Tis but a bloody prayer meeting, this is! Ye should have shipped with old Tom Tew of Newport, as I did. One time last year we sailed from Libertatia to the great coast of Araby, and in the Red Sea we overhauled one o' the Great Mogul's ships with pilgrims bound for Mecca; a hundred gun she carried, but we boarded her without losing a man, and what do ye think we found? Sixteen hundred virgins, sir! Not a maidenhead more nor less! Sixteen hundred virgins bound for Mecca, the nicest little Moors ye e'er laid eyes upon, and not above a hundred of us! Took us a day and a night to pop 'em all—Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Portogeezers, Africans, and Englishmen, we were—and ere we had done, the deck looked like a butcher's block. There is not the like o' that day and night in the history of the lickerish world, I swear't! I cut a brace myself, for all I was coming on to sixty—little brown twins they were, and tight as a timber-hitch, and I've ne'er got up the old fid since!'"