The Dermott news., 1917-05-24
SECOND lNSTAllMENT.

If I had only preserved the whole
 of this paper. there would be no break
 in the beginning of my sketch of this
 story For Captain Shaw, if 1t was he, | handed 1t to his successor in the
 charge, and he to his.
 The rule adopted on board the ships
 on which have met "The Man without | a Country was, l think. transmitted l from the beginning. No mess liked 'o
 have him permanently. because his
 presence cut off all talk of home or of
 the prospect of return. of politics or 1 letters. of peace or of war-cut on
 more than half the talk men like to 1 have at sea. But 1t was always | thought too hard that he should never
 meet the rest of us, except to touch hats, and we finally sank into one syS-
 tem. He was hot permitted to talk
 with the men unless au officer was by | With officers he had unrestraincd in | tcrcourse, as far as they and he chose. But he grew shy, though he had favor l ties: 1 wns one. Then the captain 1 always asked him to dinner on Mon 1 day. Every mess in succession took
 up the invitation in its turn. Accord | ing to the size of the ship. you had him l at your mess more or less often at l dinner His breakfast he ate in his i own stateroom, he always had q state l room, which WAS where q sentinel, or l somebody on the watch. could see the | lnnr sD.1 y-h alSa Ina ufa nr i drank he ate or drank alone Some l times, when the marines ar sailors had 1 any special publication. they were per i mitted to invite "Plain-Buttons,' as i they called him. Then Nolan WIS sent l with some officer. and the men were 1 forbidden to speak of home while he
 was there. They called him "Plain- 1 Buttons," because. while he always i chose to Wear d regulation army uni 1 form, he was not permitted to wear the army button, for the reason that i It bore either the initials or the in
 signia Gf the country he had disowned.
 remember soon after joined the navy, l was on shore with some of thsr
 older officers from our ship and from l the Brandywine, which We had met at 1 Alexandria. We had leave to make q 1 party and 20 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 i 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, 1 hung heavy: and everybody was per
 mitted to lend him books, if they were
 not published in America and .nade no
 alluSion to Il. These were common enough in the old days, when people
 in the other hemisphere talked of the l United States as little as We do of | Paraguay. He had almost all the for eiSn papers that came into the ship,
 sooner or later; only somebody must 1 go over them first, and cut out any l advertisement or stray paragraph that l alluded to America. Right In the
 midst of one of Napoleon's battles. or
 one of Canning's speeches, poor Nolan would find great hole, because on the i back of the page of that paper there 1 had been m advertisement of q packet l for New York, or scrap from the
 presidents message. l say this was
 the first time ever heard of this plan, which afterwards l had enough, and more than enough. tO do with. l re member 1t. because poor Phillips. who
 was of the party, as soon as the allu- i sion to reading was made, told story l of something which happened at the i Cape of Good Hope on Nalan's first i voyage; and it is the only thing l ever 1 knew of that voyage. They had l touched at the Cape. and had done the ] civil thing with the English admiral i and the fleet. and then, leaving for Il l long cruise up the Indian ocean, Phll- | lips had borrowed lot of English | books from an officer, which, In those | days. as indeed in these, was quite a
 wlndfall. Among them, as the Devil
 would order. was the Lay of the Last 1 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 l thought there could be any risk of any l 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 love, should be one day" So No- | Ian was permitted to join the circle | ona afternoon when 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 great deal of time so. Well,
 so 1t happened that in his turn Nolan
 took the book and read to the others i;
 and he read very well, as l know. Mo- body in the circle knew line of the poem, only 1t was all magic and bor- der chivalry, and was ten thousand