The Man Without a Country | Page 8

or mechanically,--

"This is my own, my native land!"
Then they all saw that 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 else he was sure of. But it was not
that merely. He never entered in with the other young men exactly as a
companion again. He was always shy afterwards, when I knew
him,--very seldom spoke, unless he was spoken to, except to a very few
friends. He lighted up occasionally,--I remember late in his life hearing
him fairly eloquent on something which had been suggested to him by
one of Fléchier's sermons,--but generally he had the nervous, tired look
of a heart-wounded man.
When Captain Shaw was coming home,--if, as I say, it was

Shaw,--rather to the surprise of everybody they made one of the
Windward Islands, and lay off and on for nearly a week. The boys said
the officers were sick of salt-junk, and meant to have turtle-soup before
they came home. But after several days the "Warren" came to the same
rendezvous; they exchanged signals; she sent to Phillips and these
homeward-bound men letters and papers, and told them she was
outward-bound, perhaps to the Mediterranean, and took poor Nolan and
his traps on the boat back to try his second cruise. He looked very
blank when he was told to get ready to join her. He had known enough
of the signs of the sky to know that till that moment he was going
"home." But this was a distinct evidence of something he had not
thought of, perhaps,--that there was no going home for him, even to a
prison. And this was the first of some twenty such transfers, which
brought him sooner or later into half our best vessels, but which kept
him all his life at least some hundred miles from the country he had
hoped he might never hear of again.
It may have been on that second cruise,--it was once when he was up
the Mediterranean,--that Mrs. Graff, the celebrated Southern beauty of
those days, danced with him. They had been lying a long time in the
Bay of Naples, and the officers were very intimate in the English fleet,
and there had been great festivities, and our men thought they must
give a great ball on board the ship. How they ever did it on board the
"Warren" I am sure I do not know. Perhaps it was not the "Warren," or
perhaps ladies did not take up so much room as they do now. They
wanted to use Nolan's state-room for something, and they hated to do it
without asking him to the ball; so the captain said they might ask him,
if they would be responsible that he did not talk with the wrong people,
"who would give him intelligence." So the dance went on, the finest
party that had ever been known, I dare say; for I never heard of a
man-of-war ball that was not. For ladies, they had the family of the
American consul, one or two travellers who had adventured so far, and
a nice bevy of English girls and matrons, perhaps Lady Hamilton
herself.
Well, different officers relieved each other in standing and talking with
Nolan in a friendly way, so as to be sure that nobody else spoke to him.

The dancing went on with spirit, and after a while even the