cruise, had answered that he would bring her two, and who had done it—was the man who had been stationed in the white house on the hill to watch over the old ship. 

 The battles and storms, the trials and cares, the sorrows and troubles of eighty-five years had beat upon that white head; and though he was now bent and broken, though he tottered as he paced up and down the porch after the habit of the quarter-deck, though his eye was dim indeed and his natural force greatly abated, he was still master of himself. When the Civil War broke out his brave old soul had yearned to be upon a heaving deck once more, he had craved to hear the roar of guns from the mighty batteries beneath his feet, to feel again the kiss of the salt wind upon his tanned and weather-beaten cheek. He had longed in the deadly struggle of '61-'65 to strike another blow for the old flag he had done so much to make formidable and respected on the sea; but it was not to be. Superannuated, old, laid up in ordinary, he quietly watched over the rotting ship which was his last command. 

 In some strange way, with a sailor's superstition, as the years had passed, as he had grown feebler and the ship had grown older, he bound up his own term of life with that of the vessel. While it stood he should live, when it fell should come his end. He watched and waited. 

 When the night threatened to be wild and stormy, the report of the evening gun with which Captain Barry invariably saluted the flag ere he struck it would seem to him the sounding of his death-knell. When the tempest howled around the old house, he could hear, in fancy, above its wild screaming the crashing of the timbers of the ship falling in shapeless ruins on the mouldering ways. In the morning, after such a night, he would rise and creep to the door, totter out on the porch with the aid of his cane, and peer down on the ship. Some portion of it might have been swept away, perhaps, but if it still stood he would feel that he had a respite for another day. 

 Many a tall vessel had he commanded, many a gallant frigate or great ship-of-the-line he had driven through the tempestuous seas. Upon some of them, as on the Constitution, he had won eternal fame, yet never had he loved a vessel as his heart had gone out to the rotting mass of this incompleted ship. 

 He did not dream, when he came there twenty-five years before—an old man then—that either he or the ship would last so long; yet there they both stood; older, weaker, feebler, more broken, and breaking with every passing hour, but still a ship 

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