chose. But he grew shy, though he had favorites; I was one. Then the
captain always asked him to dinner on Monday. Every mess in succession
took up 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
every body 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 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