d 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 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 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, coloured 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 Flechier'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