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 and still a captain. During the years of their association the admiral had unconsciously invested the ship with a personality of its own. It seemed human to him. He dreamed about it when he slept. He was never so happy as when awake he sat and watched it. He talked to it like a friend when they were alone. Sometimes he reached his old trembling hand out to it in a caressing gesture. He had long since grown too feeble to go down to it; he could only look upon it from afar. Yet he understood its longing, its dissatisfaction, its despair. A certain sympathy grew up between them. He loved it as it had been a woman. He would fain have kissed its keel. Yet the devotion the admiral felt for the ship was scarcely greater than that which had sprung up in the heart of the old sailor who lived aboard it. Old John Barry had been a quartermaster on the _Constitution_, and had followed the fortunes of his captain from ship to ship, from shore to shore, until he died. After that the duty of looking after the captain devolved upon his son, young John Barry; and when the commodore had been ordered to Ship House Point, more with the intention of providing him with a congenial home for his declining years than for any other purpose, young John Barry had followed him. Young John Barry he was no longer. He was fifty years old now, and, like the admiral, had unconsciously made the life of the ship stand for his own life as well. The witchery of disappointment and regret, pregnant in every timber, bore hard upon him also. He had been a gay, dashing, buoyant, happy-go-lucky jack-tar in his day; but, living alone on that great old ship, some of the melancholy, some of the dissatisfaction, some of the longing, some of the futile desire which fairly reeked from every plank had entered his own rough and rugged soul. The bitter wind had sung through the timbers of the ship too many tales of might-have-been, as he lay in his hammock night after night, not to have left its impression upon him. He became a silent, taciturn, grave old man. Of huge bulk and massive build, his appearance suggested the ship-of-the-line,--strength in age, power in decay. He loved the ship in his way even as the admiral did. Risking his life in the process, he climbed all over it, marking with skilful eyes and pained heart the slow process of disintegration. He did not kiss it,--kisses were foreign to his nature, he knew nothing of them,--but he laid his great hands caressingly upon the giant frames, he pressed his cheek against the mighty prow, he stretched himself with open arms upon the bleaching deck, as if he would embrace the ship.