The Man Without a Country | Page 7

the
invitation in its turn. According to the size of the ship, you had him at
your mess more or less often at dinner. His breakfast he ate in his own
state-room,--he always had a state-room--which was where a sentinel
or somebody on the watch could see the door. And whatever else he ate
or drank, he ate or drank alone. Sometimes, when the marines or sailors
had any special jollification, they were permitted to invite
"Plain-Buttons," as they called him. Then Nolan was sent with some
officer, and the men were forbidden to speak of home while he was
there. I believe the theory was that the sight of his punishment did them
good. They called him "Plain-Buttons," because, while he always chose
to wear a regulation army-uniform, he was not permitted to wear the
army-button, for the reason that it bore either the initials or the insignia
of the country he had disowned.
I remember, soon after I joined the navy, I was on shore with some of
the older officers from our ship and from the "Brandywine," which we
had met at Alexandria. We had leave to make a party and go up to
Cairo and the Pyramids. As we jogged along (you went on donkeys
then), some of the gentlemen (we boys called them "Dons," but the
phrase was long since changed) fell to talking about Nolan, and some
one told the system which was adopted from the first about his books
and other reading. As he was almost never permitted to go on 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," [Note 7] 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