sick of salt-junk, and meant to have turtle-soup before they came
home. But after several days the _Warren_ came to the same rendezvous;
they exchanged signals; she sent to Phillips and these homeward-bound
men letters and papers, and told them she was outward-bound, perhaps
to the Mediterranean, and took poor Nolan and his traps on the boat
back to try his second cruise. He looked very blank when he was told
to get ready to join her. He had known enough of the signs of the sky
to know that till that moment he was going "home." But this was a
distinct evidence of something he had not thought of, perhaps--that
there was no going home for him, even to a prison. And this was the
first of some twenty such transfers, which brought him sooner or later
into half our best vessels, but which kept him all his life at least
some hundred miles from the country he had hoped he might never hear
of again.

It may have been on that second cruise--it was once when he was up the
Mediterranean,--that Mrs. Graff, the celebrated Southern beauty of
those days, danced with him. They had been lying a long time in the
Bay of Naples, and the officers were very intimate in the English
fleet, and there had been great festivities, and our men thought they
must give a great ball on board the ship. How they ever did it on
board the _Warren_ I am sure I do not know. Perhaps it was not the
_Warren_, or perhaps ladies did not take up so much room as they do
now. They wanted to use Nolan's state-room for something, and they
hated to do it without asking him to the ball; so the captain said
they might ask him, if they would be responsible that he did not talk
with the wrong people, "who would give him intelligence." So the dance
went on, the finest party that had ever been known, I dare say; for I
never heard of a man-of-war ball that was not. For ladies they had the
family of the American consul, one or two travellers who had
adventured so far, and a nice bevy of English girls and matrons,
perhaps Lady Hamilton herself.

Well, different officers relieved each other in standing and talking
with Nolan in a friendly way, so as to be sure that nobody else spoke
to him. The dancing went on with spirit, and after a while even the
fellows who took this honorary guard of Nolan ceased to fear any
_contretemps_. Only when some English lady--Lady Hamilton, as I said,
perhaps--called for a set of "American dances," an odd thing happened.
Everybody then danced cont