For many years it was his habit on his birthday to go through certain physical exercises, or, as he worded it to a young officer of the fleet shortly before passing the river forts, to take a handspring; until he failed in doing this he should not, he said, feel that he was growing old. This practice he did not discontinue till after he was sixty. A junior officer of the Hartford writes: "When some of us youngsters were going through some gymnastic exercises (which he encouraged), he smilingly took hold of his left foot, by the toe of the shoe, with his right hand, and hopped his right foot through the bight without letting go." The lightness with which he clambered up the rigging of the flag-ship when entering Mobile Bay, and again over the side to see the extent of injury inflicted by the collision with the Lackawanna, sufficiently prove that up to the age of sixty-three he was capable of showing upon occasion the agility of a young man. This bodily vigor powerfully supported the energy of his mind, and carried him from daylight to dark, and from vessel to vessel of his fleet, in seasons of emergency, to see for himself that necessary work was being done without slackness; illustrating the saying attributed to Wellington, that a general was not too old when he could visit the outposts in person and on horseback. The features of the admiral can best be realized from the admirable frontispiece. As a young man he had the sallow, swarthy complexion usually associated with his Spanish blood. His hair at the same period was dark brown, becoming in middle life almost black. In his later years he was partially bald--a misfortune attributed by him to the sunstroke from which he suffered in Tunis, and which he to some extent concealed by the arrangement of the hair. The contour of the face was oval, the cheek-bones rather prominent, until the cheeks filled out as he became fleshier during the war; the eyes hazel, nose aquiline, lips small and compressed. At no time could he have been called handsome; but his face always possessed the attraction given by animation of expression and by the ready sympathy which vividly reflected his emotions, easily stirred by whatever excited his amusement, anger, or sorrow. To conceal his feelings was to him always difficult, and, when deeply moved, impossible. The old quartermaster who lashed him in the rigging at Mobile Bay told afterward how the admiral came on deck again as the poor fellows who had been killed were being laid out on the port side of the quarter-deck. "It was the only time I ever saw the old gentleman cry," he said, "but the tears came in his eyes like a little child." A casual but close observer, who visited him on board the flag-ship in New Orleans, wrote thus: "His manners are mild and prepossessing, but there is nothing striking in his presence, and the most astute physiognomist would scarcely suspect the heroic qualities that lay concealed beneath