We hear, above the grave tones of the men who are talking of the affairs of state, the clear voices of the women--fair, slender, sweet, in pearls and brocade, singing to the accompaniment of spinet or harpsichord music, as unlike ours as were their faces or their thoughts, and we all but forget that the Past is dead and can come no more, and that these are but echoes and shadows and the ashes of roses. Behind a long brick wall, gated and sentried, lies the United States Naval Academy, and another world. “But that,” as Hans Andersen says, “is another story”; a story familiar at a thousand American firesides where the life of a son dedicated to the navy is lived over by fond hearts; a story told on every wave of every sea where our American ships ride on their mission. [Illustration: THE NAVAL INSTITUTE. (WHERE THE BATTLE-FLAGS ARE KEPT.)] On the 13th of June, 1845, James K. Polk, being President of the United States, and George Bancroft, Secretary of the Navy--a letter was written by Mr. Bancroft to a Board of Examiners of Midshipmen, sitting in Philadelphia, proposing the foundation of a naval school, and suggesting Fort Severn as a suitable site. Urged by Commodore Thomas Ap-Catesby Jones and Captain Isaac Mayo, the Committee approved the suggestion, and, although the usual congressional and sectional opposition had to be overcome, the School was opened on October 10th of the same year. During the war there was a temporary flight to Newport, and there have been, from time to time, various schemes for removing it permanently from Annapolis. It has long since become a permanent fixture, and additions have been made to the Fort Severn property (purchased in 1808), making an ample and beautiful home for the cadets and their corps of instructors. Time ceases to be subject to clocks when one enters the green, shady Academy grounds, beside which the waters flash and gleam, and bells divide the hours of the busy lives of the lithe young sailors who are forever marching under the trees to this duty or to that; and whose four years of residence are crowded with ten thousand things which a landsman need not know, but which go to make a finished seaman. Among the officers, gravely saluting them as they go to classes, one sees many a famous face, for many of the simple, quiet gentlemen have done great deeds in their day. There are some memorials of older days--the monument which recalls our victory at Tripoli, some cannon captured in some “Sea-fight far away,” and some figure-heads of ancient ships. Most precious of all is the worn flag, guarded jealously in the Naval Institute, which bore the wonderful message “Don’t give up the Ship.”