country?"

"No, my girl, and what's more, I am a bit uneasy as to what the
fellows on the Carolina will say if they ever hear I went to sea in
a hollowed-out pumpkin, and with a young lady--well, dressed as you
are--for crew. Even now I cannot imagine how you get your ships so
trim and shapely--there is not a seam or a patch anywhere, it looks as
if you had run them into a mould."

"That's just what we have done, sir, and now you will witness the moulds
at work, for here we are," and the little skiff was pulled ashore and the
Martians and I jumped out on the shelving beach, hauled our boat up high
and dry, and there right over us, like great green umbrellas, spread the
fronds of the outmost garden of this strangest of all ship-building yards.
Briefly, and not to make this part of my story too long, those gilded boys
and girls took me ashore, and chattering like finches in the evening,
showed how they planted their gourd seed, nourished the gigantic plants
as they grew with brackish water and the burnt ashes; then, when they
flowered, mated the male and female blossoms, glorious funnels of golden
hue big enough for one to live in; and when the young fruit was of the
bigness of an ordinary bolster, how they slipped it into a double mould
of open reed-work something like the two halves of a walnut-shell; and
how, growing day by day in this, it soon took every curve and line they
chose to give it, even the hanging keel below, the strengthened bulwarks,
and tall prow-piece. It was so ingenious, yet simple; and I confess I
laughed over my first skiff "on the stalk," and fell to bantering the
Martians, asking whether it was a good season for navies, whether their
Cunarders were spreading nicely, if they could give me a pinch of barge
seed, or a yacht in bud to show to my friends at home.