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 Nolan 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 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 drank something, 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 that 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 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, concentred 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 state-room, “And by Jove,” said Phillips, “we did not see him for two months again.  And I had to make up some beggarly story to that English surgeon why I did not return his Walter Scott to him.”

That story shows about the time when Nolan’s braggadocio must have broken down.  At first, they said, he took a very high tone, considered his imprisonment a mere farce, affected to enjoy the voyage, and all that; but Phillips said that after he came out of his state-room he never was the same man 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.  He was always shy afterwards, when I knew him,—­very seldom spoke, unless he was spoken to, except to a very few friends.  He lighted up occasionally,—­I remember late in his life hearing him fairly eloquent on something which had been suggested to him by one of Fléchier’s sermons,—­but generally he had the nervous, tired look of a heart-wounded man.