On the seventeenth day of April, 1861, Virginia seceded from the Union.  The day following, our gray-haired captain, expressing the opinion that secession was not the will of the majority of the people, but that the state had been dragooned out of the Union by a coterie of politicians, was told that he could no longer live in Norfolk.

“Very well,” he answered, “I can live somewhere else.”

He went home and told his wife that the time had come when she must choose whether she would remain with her own kinsfolk or follow him.  Her choice was made on the instant, and within two hours, David Glasgow Farragut, his wife and their only son, were on a steamer headed for the North.  A few days later, he offered his services to the Union.

Before going forward with him upon his great career, let us cast a glance over his boyhood—­such a boyhood as falls to the lot of not one in a million.  Born in 1801, of a father who had served in the Revolution and who was afterwards to become a friend and companion of Andrew Jackson, his childhood was passed amid the dangers and alarms of the Tennessee frontier.  In 1808 occurred the incident which paved the way for his entrance into the navy.  While fishing on Lake Pontchartrain, his father fell in with a boat in which was lying an old man prostrated by the heat of the sun.  Farragut took him at once to his own home, where he was tenderly cared for, but he died a few days later.  The sufferer was David Porter, father of Captain Porter of the Essex, at that time in charge of the naval station at New Orleans.

Captain Porter was informed of the accident to his father, and hastened to the home of the Farraguts.  He felt deeply their kindness, and as some slight return, offered to adopt one of the Farragut children, take him North with him, and do what he could for his advancement.  Young David promptly said that he would go, the arrangements were concluded, and the boy of seven accompanied his new protector to Washington.  He spent two years at school there, and then, on December 17, 1810, at the age of nine, received an appointment as midshipman in the United States navy.  Two years later, he accompanied Porter in the Essex on that memorable trip around Cape Horn.

Porter took so many prizes in the South Pacific that his supply of older officers ran out, and twelve-year old David Farragut was appointed prize-master of one of them, with orders to take her to Valparaiso.  When Farragut gave his first order, her skipper, a hot-tempered old sea-dog, flew into a rage, and declaring that he had “no idea of trusting himself with a blamed nutshell,” rushed below for his pistols.  The twelve-year-old commander shouted after him that, if he came on deck again, he would be thrown overboard, and thenceforth was master of the ship.  He was back on the Essex again when she was attacked in Valparaiso harbor by a British squadron, and got his baptism of fire in one of the hardest-fought naval battles in history.