time, more than to do anything else all the time; but that he read just five hours a day.  “Then,” he said, “I keep up my note-books, writing in them at such and such hours from what I have been reading; and I include in these my scrap-books.”  These were very curious indeed.  He had six or eight, of different subjects.  There was one of History, one of Natural Science, one which he called “Odds and Ends.”  But they were not merely books of extracts from newspapers.  They had bits of plants and ribbons, shells tied on, and carved scraps of bone and wood, which he had taught the men to cut for him, and they were beautifully illustrated.  He drew admirably.  He had some of the funniest drawings there, and some of the most pathetic, that I have ever seen in my life.  I wonder who will have Nolan’s scrap-books.

Well, he said his reading and his notes were his profession, and that they took five hours and two hours respectively of each day.  “Then,” said he, “every man should have a diversion as well as a profession.  My Natural History is my diversion.”  That took two hours a day more.  The men used to bring him birds and fish, but on a long cruise he had to satisfy himself with centipedes and cockroaches and such small game.  He was the only naturalist I ever met who knew anything about the habits of the house-fly and the mosquito.  All those people can tell you whether they are Lepidoptera or Steptopotera; but as for telling how you can get rid of them, or how they get away from you when you strike them,—­why Linnaeus knew as little of that as John Foy the idiot did.  These nine hours made Nolan’s regular daily “occupation.”  The rest of the time he talked or walked.  Till he grew very old, he went aloft a great deal.  He always kept up his exercise; and I never heard that he was ill.  If any other man was ill, he was the kindest nurse in the world; and he knew more than half the surgeons do.  Then if anybody was sick or died, or if the captain wanted him to, on any other occasion, he was always ready to read prayers.  I have said that he read beautifully.

My own acquaintance with Philip Nolan began six or eight years after the War, on my first voyage after I was appointed a midshipman.  It was in the first days after our Slave-Trade treaty, while the Reigning House, which was still the House of Virginia, had still a sort of sentimentalism about the suppression of the horrors of the Middle Passage, and something was sometimes done that way.  We were in the South Atlantic on that business.  From the time I joined, I believe I thought Nolan was a sort of lay chaplain,—­a chaplain with a blue coat.  I never asked about him.  Everything in the ship was strange to me.  I knew it was green to ask questions, and I suppose I thought there was a “Plain-Buttons” on every ship.  We had him to dine in our mess once a week, and the caution was given that on that day nothing was to be said about home.  But if they had told us not to say anything about the planet