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," 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 an