“Mr. Marshal,” continued old Morgan, “see that no one mentions the United States to the prisoner. Mr. Marshal, make my respects to Lieutenant Mitchell at Orleans, and request him to order that no one shall mention the United States to the prisoner while he is on board ship.”
Nolan had the freedom of the ship he was on, so long as he heard nothing of his country. No mess liked to have him permanently, because his presence cut off all talk of home or of the prospect of return, of politics or letters, of peace or of war—cut off more than half the talk men liked to have at sea.
Sometimes, when the marines or sailors had any special jollification, they were permitted to invite “Plain-Buttons,” as they called him. Then Nolan was sent with some officer, and the men were forbidden to speak of home while he was there. I believe the theory was that the sight of his punishment did them good. They called him “Plain-Buttons,” because, while he always chose to wear a regulation army uniform, he was not permitted to wear the army button, for the reason that it bore either the initials or the insignia of the country he had disowned.
As he was almost never permitted to go on shore, even though the vessel lay in port for months, his 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. 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.
Among these books 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, so Nolan was permitted to join the circle one afternoon when a lot of them sat on deck smoking and reading aloud. 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 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 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.”