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 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 any thing 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 seemed impossible to us that any body 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 fo