try or to see any information regarding it; and you will specially caution all the officers under your command to take care that in the various indulgences which may be granted this rule, in which his punishment is involved, shall not be broken. "It is the intention of the government that he shall never again see his country, which he has disowned. Before the end of your cruise, you will receive orders which will give effect to this intention.

66

Respectfully yours,

"W. SOUTHARD, for the
"Secretary of the Navy."

If I had only preserved the whole of this paper, there would be no break in the beginning of my sketch of this story. For Captain Shaw, if it was he, handed it to his successor in the charge, and he to his, and I suppose that the commander of the Levant has it to-day as his authority for keeping this man in this mild custody.

The rule adopted on board the ships on which I have met "the man without a country" was, I think, transmitted from the beginning. No mess liked to have him permanently, because his presence cut off all talk of home or of the prospect of return, of politics or letters, of peace or of war—cut off more than half the talk men like to have at sea. But it was always thought too hard that he should never meet the rest of us, except to touch hats, and we finally sank into one system.

He was not permitted to talk with the men, unless an officer was by. With officers he had unrestrained intercourse, as far as they and he chose. But he grew shy, though he had favorites. Then the captain always asked him to dinner on Monday. Every mess in succession took up the invitation in its turn. Ac

cording 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 stateroom-he always had a stateroom, 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 that 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 that 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 (we went on donkeys then), some of the gentlemen 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 of the President's message. I say this was the first time I ever heard of this plan, which afterward 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 that 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, was quite a windfall. Among them was the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," which all of them had 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, so Nolan was permitted to join the circle one afternoon when a lot of them sat on deck, smoking and reading aloud. It so 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 a 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, expecting 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 be, 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 coughed 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, and could not go on, but started up, swung the book into the sea, vanished into his stateroom," And," said Phillips, "we did not see him again for two months."

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 stateroom 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 merely that. He never entered in with the other young men exactly as a companion again. He was always shy afterward when I knew him-very seldom spoke unless he was spoken to, except to a very few friends.

We cannot honor our country with too deep a reverence; we cannot love her with an affection too pure and fervent; we cannot serve her with an energy of purpose, or a faithfulness of zeal, too steadfast and ardent. And what is our country? It is not the East, with her hills and her valleys, with her countless sails, and the rocky ramparts of her shores. It is not the North, with her thousand villages and her harvest home, with her frontiers of the lakes and the ocean. It is not the West, with her forest sea and her inland isles, with her luxuriant expanses, clothed in the verdant corn; with her beautiful Ohio and her verdant Missouri. Nor is it yet the South, opulent in the mimic snow of the cotton, in the rich plantations of the rustling cane, and in the golden robes of the rice field. What are these but the sister families of one greater, better, holier family, oOUR COUNTRY? THOMAS S. GRIMKÉ.