On the hill back of the Point, embowered on three sides in the trees, which had been cut away in front to afford a fair view of the ship, the Point itself, and the open waters of the lake beyond, stood an old white house facing the water, with a long covered porch, high-pillared and lofty, extending across its entire front. Old, yet young compared to the ship. Overlooking the ship, on a platform on the very brow of the hill, a long, old-fashioned six-pound gun was mounted on a naval carriage. Back of the gun rose a tall flag-staff, and from the top fluttered night and day a small blue flag with two stars, the ensign of a rear-admiral. There were no masts or spars upon the ship below the hill, of course, but aft from the mouldering taffrail a staff had been erected, and from it flew the stars and stripes, for during the last half of her existence the ship had rejoiced in a crew and a captain! 

 Some twenty-five years since a quaint old naval officer had taken up his abode at the house on the hill. With him had come a young sailor, who, disdaining the house, had slung his hammock aboard the ship,—finding a place between decks which, after a few repairs, would shelter him from the storms. When the old officer came, he hoisted at the mast which was at once erected in the yard the broad blue pennant of a commodore, and it was only after Farragut had made his splendid passage up the Mississippi, and awakened the quiet shores of the Father of Waters with the thunder of his guns, so that the title of commodore became too small for him, that the old veteran had been promoted with other veterans—and with Farragut himself—to the rank of rear-admiral, recently established,—certainly a rank entirely in consonance with his merit at least. 

 The old man had been practically forgotten, lost sight of, in the glory accruing to the newer names among the Civil War heroes; yet he had been among the foremost in that great galaxy of sailors who had made the navy of the United States so formidable in the War of 1812. 

 Old men of the town, whose memories as children ran back beyond even the life of the ship, recalled having seen, in those busy, unforgotten days of 1814-15, many uniforms like to the quaint old dress which the admiral sometimes wore on occasions of ceremony; and there were some yet living who remembered the day when the news came that the mighty Constitution had added to her record the last and most brilliant of her victories in the capture of the frigates Cyane and Levant. The man who had made the capture—who, when his wife had asked him to bring her a British frigate for a present when he set forth upon the 

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