of their ships-of-war. Farragut's stay on the station was,
however, again cut short. The schooner Boxer arrived in Rio Janeiro on
her way home from the East Indies; and it becoming necessary to give her
a new commanding officer, he received orders to take her to the United
States. He sailed in her on the 8th of June, 1834, and on the 25th of
July reached Norfolk, where the vessel was put out of commission and he
again returned to his family. A period of nearly four years of shore
duty followed. During the latter two of these Farragut was a constant
applicant for sea service, which he could not obtain. His wife was at
this time becoming ever weaker and weaker. "I was necessarily confined
very much to the house," he writes, "for my wife was so helpless I was
obliged to lift her and carry her about like a child." His tender and
untiring devotion to the suffering invalid was no less conspicuous than
his careful attention to the other duties of life, and was the constant
remark of those who were witnesses of this sorrowful period.

In April, 1838, Farragut was again ordered to sea in the home squadron,
and in the following August, though still only a lieutenant, took
command, in Pensacola, of the sloop-of-war Erie; a position that could
only be temporary, because belonging naturally to an officer of higher
rank. It fell to him, however, at a period of peculiar interest--when
France became involved with Mexico in one of those brief hostilities by
which alone were broken the long years of peace between Waterloo and the
Crimean War. The quarrel between the two was simply as to the reparation
due to French subjects for injuries received during the long years of
confusion through which Mexico then had been and still was passing. As a
political question it possesses no present interest whatever; but to a
naval officer of Farragut's strong professional feeling and close habits
of observation it offered a peculiar opportunity for noting the silent
progress made during the long peace by the material of war among the
navies of Europe, where the necessity of constant preparation insures an
advance in which the United States then, as now, tended to lag behind.
It supplied also a test, under certain conditions, of the much-vexed
question of the power of ships against forts; for the French squadron,
though few in numbers, deliberately undertook to batter by horizontal
fire, as well as to bombard, in the more correct sense of the word, with