I remember soon after I joined the navy I was on shore with some of the
older officers from our ship and from the _Brandywine_, which we had
met at Alexandria. We had leave to make a party and go up to Cairo and
the Pyramids. As we jogged along (you went on donkeys then), some of
the gentlemen (we boys called them "Dons," but the phrase was long
since changed) fell to talking about Nolan, and some one 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
every body was permitted 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 foreign
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. This was a little cruel sometimes, when the back
of what was cut might be as innocent as Hesiod. Right in the midst of
one of Napoleon's battles, or one of Canning's speeches, poor Nolan
would find a great hole, because on the back of the page of that paper
there had been an advertisement of a packet for New York, or a scrap
from the President's message. I say this was the first time I ever
heard of this plan, which afterward I had enough and more than enough
to do with. I remember it, because poor Phillips, who was of the
party, as soon as the allusion 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 civil thing with the English
admiral and the fleet, and then, leaving for a long cruise up the
Indian Ocean, Phillips had borrowed a lot of English books from an
officer, which, in those days, as indeed in these, was quite a