But now I can foresee the day of those ships is done, and I think I have discernment enough left to see that mine is also. Here in this year 1909, hardly six years since my retirement as Engineer-in-Chief of the Navy, I look upon the vast fleet the machinery of which I designed, and I see its passing. Last year the _Lusitania_, turbine-driven, speeding across the Atlantic to a new record, sounded the knell of the huge reciprocating engines I designed for all those battleships. And practically completed, waiting to join her older sisters, was the _Delaware_, our newest ship, a “dreadnought” so they call her now, a huge ship of 20,000 tons, but—fired by oil! Her oil fires spell the doom of the romance of the fireroom—the stokers, the grimy coalpassers, the slice bar—that pandemonium, that man-made inferno, with forced-draft fans roaring, with the clang of coal buckets trolleying from bunker to fireroom floor, with the glare of the flames on sweating torsos as the furnace doors swing back and brawny arms heave in the coal! They’ll all go soon, flying connecting rods and straining coalheavers, driven out by the prosaic turbine and the even more prosaic oil burner. But so it goes. We marine engineers dream, design, and build, to send forth on the oceans the most beautiful creations man turns out anywhere on land or sea—but soon our ships fade from existence like a mist before the sun. For sixteen years I was Engineer-in-Chief for the Navy, and the machinery of that battlefleet the nation watched so proudly steaming home through the Capes was my creation, but I’ve seen enough in the fifty years since I entered the Navy when the Civil War broke out to doubt that ten years more will find a single ship of that armada still in active service. Turbines, oil burning boilers, bigger guns, heavier armor—they are crowding in fast now, and soon my ships will go to the wreckers to make way in the fleet for the bigger and faster vessels sliding down the building ways in the wake of the huge _Delaware_. Odd how one’s perspective changes with the years! As a young engineer, I would have believed with those cheering thousands last month in Hampton Roads that to have had a guiding hand in creating that fleet would be the high light in my life—but now I know better. In the end it is how men lived and died, not the material things they constructed, that the world is most likely to remember. That is why in my mind a stone cross in Annapolis Cemetery looms larger and larger as the years drift by. Years ago, hewn from a driftwood spar, I set up the original of that cross in the frozen Lena Delta to stand guard over the bodies of my shipmates; that stone replica in Annapolis, silent marker of their memory, will loom up in our history long after there has completely vanished from the seas every trace of the ships and the machinery which the world now links with the name of Melville.