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.” 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 colored 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 those titles, power, and pelf, The wretch, concentered 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 stateroom, and we did not see him for two months 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. * * * * *