The Man Without a Country and Other Tales | Page 6

shore,
even though the vessel lay in port for months, his time at the best hung
heavy; and everybody was permitted to lend him books, if they were
not published in America and made no allusion to it. These were
common enough in the old days, when people in the other hemisphere
talked of the United States as little as we do of Paraguay. He had
almost all the foreign papers that came into the ship, sooner or later;
only somebody must go over them first, and cut out any advertisement
or stray paragraph that alluded to America. This was a little cruel
sometimes, when the back of what was cut out might be as innocent as
Hesiod. Right in the midst of one of Napoleon's battles, or one of
Canning's speeches, poor Nolan would find a great hole, because on the
back of the page of that paper there had been an advertisement of a
packet for New York, or a scrap from the President's message. I say
this was the first time I ever heard of this plan, which afterwards I had
enough and more than enough to do with. I remember it, because poor
Phillips, who was of the party, as soon as the allusion to reading was
made, told a story of something which happened at the Cape of Good
Hope on Nolan's first voyage; and it is the only thing I ever knew of
that voyage. They had touched at the Cape, and had done the civil thing
with the English Admiral and the fleet, and then, leaving for a long
cruise up the Indian Ocean, Phillips had borrowed a lot of English
books from an officer, which, in those days, as indeed in these, was
quite a windfall. Among them, as the Devil would order, was the "Lay
of the Last Minstrel," which they had all of them heard of, but which
most of them had never seen. I think it could not have been published
long. Well, nobody thought there could be any risk of anything national

in that, though Phillips swore old Shaw had cut out the "Tempest" from
Shakespeare before he let Nolan have it, because he said "the Bermudas
ought to be ours, and, by Jove, should be one day." So Nolan was
permitted to join the circle one afternoon when a lot of them sat on
deck smoking and reading aloud. People do not do such things so often
now, but when I was young we got rid of a great deal of time so. Well,
so it happened that in his turn Nolan took the book and read to the
others; and he read very well, as I know. Nobody in the circle knew a
line of the poem, only it was all magic and Border chivalry, and was
ten thousand years ago. Poor Nolan read steadily through the fifth canto,
stopped a minute and drank something, and then began, without a
thought of what was coming,--
"Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath
said,"--
It seems impossible to us that anybody ever heard this for the first time;
but all these fellows did then, and poor Nolan himself went on, still
unconsciously or mechanically,--
"This is my own, my native land!"
Then they all saw something was to pay; but he expected to get through,
I suppose, turned a little pale, but plunged on,--
"Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned, As home his footsteps he
hath turned From wandering on a foreign strand?-- If such there breathe,
go, mark him well,"--
By this time the men were all beside themselves, wishing there was any
way to make him turn over two pages; but he had not quite presence of
mind for that; he gagged a little, colored crimson, and staggered on,--
"For him no minstrel raptures swell; High though his titles, proud his
name, Boundless his wealth as wish can claim, Despite these titles,
power, and pelf, The wretch, concentred all in self,"--
and here the poor fellow choked, could not go on, but started up, swung
the book into the sea, vanished into his state-room, "And by Jove," said
Phillips, "we did not see him for two months again. And I had to make
up some beggarly story to that English surgeon why I did not return his
Walter Scott to him."
That story shows about the time when Nolan's braggadocio must have
broken down. At first, they said, he took a very high tone, considered
his imprisonment a mere farce, affected to enjoy the voyage, and all

that; but Phillips said that after he came out of his state-room he never
was the same man again. He never read aloud again, unless it was the
Bible or Shakespeare, or something