I was born on May 1, 1842, on Fifth Avenue, New York, not a long way north of Washington Square. My father was a distinguished surgeon and owned a large estate on Lake Champlain, where most of my youthful summers were spent. I had three brothers and two sisters; but not for many years have I known where they are, or whether alive or dead. After having had a private tutor at home I was educated by jumps at the Hinesburgh, Vermont, Academy; at the old Troy Conference Academy at Poultney, Vermont, and at the Burlington, Vermont, Academy, where, young as I was, I became deeply interested in the study of medicine, for which I had inherited a pronounced liking; that was the one point on which I seemed to fit in with the family. I did not stay a great while at any institution because of my success in leading the other students into all sorts of dare-devil pranks, to the detriment of discipline and the despair of the dominies. As an evidence of the inclining twig I remember, with still some feeling of pride, that during one of my last summers on Lake Champlain I organized fifteen boys of the neighborhood into an expedition against the Indians of the far West. We were equipped with blankets stolen from our beds, three flasks of powder, and nearly one hundred pounds of lead, which was to be moulded into bullets for the extermination of the redskins of the world. As Commander-in-Chief I carried the only pistol in the party but we expected to seize additional arms on the way to the battlefields. I had scouts ahead of us and on both flanks and by avoiding the roads and the bank of the lake we managed to evade capture until the third day, although the whole countryside was searching for us, in rather hysterical fashion. After a somewhat scattered series of escapades, which increased the ire of the family and intensified my dislike of their prosaic protestations, my father solemnly declared his intention of sending me to the United States Naval Academy. It was his idea, as he expressed it, that the discipline which prevailed there would be sufficient to restrain me and at the same time my active imagination would find a vent in my inborn love of the sea. I was delighted with this promised realization of my boyhood dream, for it seemed to me that the career of a naval officer presented greater possibilities of adventure than any other. Former Congressman George P. Marsh, of Burlington, Vermont, an old friend of the family, who afterward was sent to Italy as American Minister and died there, arranged to secure my appointment to Annapolis, and I entered a preparatory school to brush up on the studies required by the entrance examination. The machinery to procure my appointment had been set in motion and I was ready to take the examination when the opening gun of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter, on April 12, 1861.