The Pleasantville press. (Pleasantville, N.J.) 1912-1929, 1917-06-23

rooiH, WHICH WAS where Il Sentlnel, OF
somebody on the watch, could see the
door. And whatever else he ate or
drank he ate or drank alone. Some
times, when the marines or sailors had
any special jollification, they were per-
mitted to invite "PIain-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. They called him "Plain-
Buttons" because, while he always
chose to wear a regulation army uni
form, he was not permitted to wear
the army button, for the reason that
1t bore either the initials or the in
sigma of the country he had disowned.
I remember, soon after l joined the
navy, l was on shore with some of the
older officers from u ship and from
the Brandywine, which we had me at
Alexandria. We had leave to make a
party and go up to Cairo and the Pyra-
mids. AS we logged along some of
the gentlemen fell to talking about No
Ian, and someone told the system
which was adopted from the first about
his books and other reading. 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 per-
mitted to lend him books, If they were
not published in America and made no
allusion to it. These were common
enough in the old days, when people
in the other hemisphere talked of the
United States as little as we do of
Paraguay. He had almost all the for
eign 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. Right in the
midst of one of Napoleon's battles, or
one of Canning's speeches, poor Nolan
back of the page of that paper there
had been an advertisement of a packet
for New York, or a scrap from the
presidents message. l say this was
the first time l ever heard of this plan,
which afterwards 1 had enough, and
more than enough, to do with. I re-
member it, because poor Phillips, who
was of the party, as soon as the allu-
sion to reading was made, told a story
of something which happened at the
Cape of Good Hope ON Nolan's first
voyage; and it is the only thing I ever
knew of that voyage. They had
touched at the Cape, and had done the
o;-;I +lso. rr;+6 @bo Eorl;ch n6nniroI
and the fleet, and then, leaving for a
long cruise up the Indian ocean,, Phil
lips had borrowed a lot of English
books from an officer, which, in those
days, as indeed in these, was quite a
'windfall. Among them, as the Devil
would order, was the Lay of the Last
Minstrel" which they had all of them
heard of, but which most of them had
never seen. l think it could not have
been published long. Well, nobody
thought there could be any risk of any,
thing national in that, though Phillips
swore old Shaw had cut out the
Tempest" from Shakespeare before
he let Nolan have it, because he said,
'The Bermudas ought to be ours and,
by Jove, should be one day." So No
Ian was permitted to join the circle
one afternoon when a lot of them sat
on deck smoking and reading aloud.
People do not do such things so often
now, but when I was young we got
rid of a great deal of time so. Well,
so it happened that in his turn Nolan
took the book and read to the others
and he read very well, as / know. No
body in the circle knew a line of the
poem, only 1t was all magic and Dor
der chivalry, and was ten thousand
years ago. Poor Nolan read steadily
through the fifth canto, stopped a min
ute and drank something, and then be-
gan, without a thought of what was
coming
Breathes there the man, with soul so
dead,
Who never to himself hath said
1t seems impossible to us that any
body ever heard this for the first time;
but all these fellows did then, and
poor Nolan himself went on, still I'M
consciously or mechanically
This is my own, my native land!
Then they all saw something vas
to pay but he expected to get through,
1 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 OF a foreign
If such there breathe, go, mark him well.
By this time the men were all be-
side themselves, wishing there vas any
way to make him turn over two pages;
but he had not quite presence of mind
for that; he gagged a little, 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 these titles, power and pelf,
The wretch, concentered all in self
and here the poor fellow choked, could