ry grateful to you to-day; you are one of us
to-day; you will be named in the despatches."

And then the old man took off his own sword of ceremony, and gave it
to Nolan, and made him put it on. The man told me this who saw it.
Nolan cried like a baby, and well he might. He had not worn a sword
since that infernal day at Fort Adams. But always afterwards on
occasions of ceremony, he wore that quaint old French sword of the
commodore's.

The captain did mention him in the despatches. It was always said he
asked that he might be pardoned. He wrote a special letter to the
Secretary of War. But nothing ever came of it. As I said, that was
about the time when they began to ignore the whole transaction at
Washington, and when Nolan's imprisonment began to carry itself on
because there was nobody to stop it without any new orders from home.

I have heard it said that he was with Porter when he took possession
of the Nukahiwa Islands. Not this Porter, you know, but old Porter,
his father, Essex Porter--that is, the old Essex Porter, not this
Essex. As an artillery officer, who had seen service in the West,
Nolan knew more about fortifications, embrasures, ravelins, stockades,
and all that, than any of them did; and he worked with a right
goodwill in fixing that battery all right. I have always thought it
was a pity Porter did not leave him in command there with Gamble. That
would have settled all the question about his punishment. We should
have kept the islands, and at this moment we should have one station
in the Pacific Ocean. Our French friends, too, when they wanted this
little watering-place, would have found it was preoccupied. But
Madison and the Virginians, of course, flung all that away.

All that was near fifty years ago. If Nolan was thirty then, he must
have been near eighty when he died. He looked sixty when he was forty.
But he never seemed to me to change a hair afterwards. As I imagine
his life, from what I have seen and heard of it, he must have been in
every sea, and yet almost never on land. He must have known, in a
formal way, more officers in our service than any man living knows. He
told me once, with a grave smile, that no man in the world lived so
methodical a life as he. "You know the boys say I am the Iron Mask,
and you know how busy he was." He said it did not do for anyone to try
to read all the time, more than to do anything else all the time; and
that he used to read just five hours a day. "Th