He is a larger man than the portraits indicate; and his figure, while that of a strong man in good health and form and well nourished, is not stout and, though full, is firm; and his step has elasticity in it.

His clean-shaven cheek and chin are massive, and drawn on fine lines full of character--no fatty obscuration, no decline of power; a stern but sunny and cloudless face--a good one for a place in history; no show of indulgence, no wrinkles; not the pallor of marble, rather the glint of bronze--the unabated force good for other chapters of history.

It would be extremely interesting to report the talk of the Admiral; but there were two things about him that reminded me of James G.Blaine, something of the vivid personality of the loved and lost leader; something in his eye and his manner, more in the startling candor with which he spoke of things it would be premature to give the world, and, above all, the absence of all alarm about being reported--the unconscious consciousness that one must know this was private and no caution needed.

A verbatim report of the Admiral would, however, harm no one, signify high-toned candor and a certain breezy simplicity in the treatment of momentous matters.

Evidently here was a man not posing, a hero because his character was heroic, a genuine personage--not artificial, proclamatory, a picker of phrases, but a doer of deeds that explain themselves; a man with imagination, not fantastic but realistic, who must have had a vision during the night after the May-day battle of what might be the great hereafter; beholding under the southern constellations the gigantic shadow of America, crowned with stars, with the archipelagoes of Asia under her feet and broad and mighty destinies at command.
It was the next day that he anchored precisely where his famous ship was swinging when I sat beside him; and his words to the representative of three centuries of Spanish misrule had in them an uncontemplated flash from the flint and steel of fixed purpose and imperial force.