When Captain Shaw was coming home,—­if, as I say, it was Shaw,—­rather to the surprise of everybody they made one of the Windward Islands, and lay off and on for nearly a week.  The boys said the officers were sick of salt-junk, and meant to have turtle-soup before they came home.  But after several days the “Warren” came to the same rendezvous; they exchanged signals; she sent to Phillips and these homeward-bound men letters and papers, and told them she was outward-bound, perhaps to the Mediterranean, and took poor Nolan and his traps on the boat back to try his second cruise.  He looked very blank when he was told to get ready to join her.  He had known enough of the signs of the sky to know that till that moment he was going “home.”  But this was a distinct evidence of something he had not thought of, perhaps,—­that there was no going home for him, even to a prison.  And this was the first of some twenty such transfers, which brought him sooner or later into half our best vessels, but which kept him all his life at least some hundred miles from the country he had hoped he might never hear of again.

It may have been on that second cruise,—­it was once when he was up the Mediterranean,—­that Mrs. Graff, the celebrated Southern beauty of those days, danced with him.  They had been lying a long time in the Bay of Naples, and the officers were very intimate in the English fleet, and there had been great festivities, and our men thought they must give a great ball on board the ship.  How they ever did it on board the “Warren” I am sure I do not know.  Perhaps it was not the “Warren,” or perhaps ladies did not take up so much room as they do now.  They wanted to use Nolan’s state-room for something, and they hated to do it without asking him to the ball; so the captain said they might ask him, if they would be responsible that he did not talk with the wrong people, “who would give him intelligence.”  So the dance went on, the finest party that had ever been known, I dare say; for I never heard of a man-of-war ball that was not.  For ladies, they had the family of the American consul, one or two travellers who had adventured so far, and a nice bevy of English girls and matrons, perhaps Lady Hamilton herself.

Well, different officers relieved each other in standing and talking with Nolan in a friendly way, so as to be sure that nobody else spoke to him.  The dancing went on with spirit, and after a while even the fellows who took this honorary guard of Nolan ceased to fear any contretemps.  Only when some English lady—­Lady Hamilton, as I said, perhaps—­called for a set of “American dances,” an odd thing happened.  Everybody then danced contra-dances.  The black band, nothing loath, conferred as to what “American dances” were, and started off with “Virginia Reel,” which they followed with “Money-Musk,” which, in its turn in those days, should have been followed by “The Old Thirteen.”  But just as Dick, the leader, tapped for his fiddles to begin, and bent forward,