Lieutenant Pim had been appointed in the autumn to the "Banks Land

search," and had carried out his depots of provisions when the other

officers took theirs. Captain McClure's chart and despatch made it no

longer necessary to have that coast surveyed, but made it all the more

necessary to have some one go and see if he was still there. The chances

were against this, as a whole summer had intervened since he was heard

from. Lieutenant Pim proposed, however, to travel all round Banks Land,

which is an island about the size and shape of Ireland, in search of

him, Collinson, Franklin, or anybody. Captain Kellett, however, told him

not to attempt this with his force, but to return to the ship by the

route he went. First he was to go to the Bay of Mercy; if the

"Investigator" was gone, he was to follow any traces of her, and, if

possible, communicate with her or her consort, the "Enterprise."

Lieutenant Pim started with a sledge and seven men, and a dog-sledge

with two under Dr. Domville, the surgeon, who was to bring back the

earliest news from the Bay of Mercy to the captain. There was a relief

sledge to go part way and return. For the intense cold of this early

season they had even more careful arrangements than those we have

described. Their tent was doubled. They had extra Mackintoshes, and

whatever else could be devised. They had bad luck at starting,--broke

down one sledge and had to send back for another; had bad weather, and

must encamp, once for three days. "Fortunately," says the lieutenant of

this encampment, "the temperature arose from fifty-one below zero to

thirty-six below, and there remained," while the drift accumulated to

such a degree around the tents, that within them the thermometer was

only twenty below, and, when they cooked, rose to zero. A pleasant time

of it they must have had there on the ice, for those three days, in

their bags smoking and sleeping! No wonder that on the fourth day they

found they moved slowly, so cramped and benumbed were they. This morning

a new sledge came to them from the ship; they got out of their bags,

packed, and got under way again. They were still running along shore,

but soon sent back the relief party which had brought the new sled, and

in a few days more set out to cross the strait, some twenty-five to

thirty miles wide, which, when it is open, as no man has ever seen it,

is one of the Northwest Passages discovered by these expeditions.

Horrible work it was! Foggy and dark, so they could not choose the road,

and, as it happened, lit on the very worst mass of broken ice in the

channel. Just as they entered on it, one black raven must needs appear.

"Bad luck," said the men. And when Mr. Pim shot a musk-ox, their first,

and the wounded creature got away, "So much for the raven," they croaked

again. Only three miles the first day, four miles the second day, two

and a half the third, and half a mile the fourth; this was all they

gained by most laborious hauling over the broken ice, dragging one

sledge at a time, and sometimes carrying forward the stores separately

and going back for the sledges. Two days more gave them eight miles

more, but on the seventh day on this narrow strait, the dragging being a

little better, the great sledge slipped off a smooth hummock, broke one

runner to smash, and "there they were."

If the two officers had a little bit of a "tiff" out there on the ice,

with the thermometer at eighteen below, only a little dog-sledge to get

them anywhere, their ship a hundred miles off, fourteen days' travel as

they had come, nobody ever knew it; they kept their secret from us, it

is nobody's business, and it is not to be wondered at. Certainly they

did not agree. The Doctor, whose sled, the "James Fitzjames," was still

sound, thought they had best leave the stores and all go back; but the

Lieutenant, who had the command, did not like to give it up, so he took

the dogs and the "James Fitzjames" and its two men and went on, leaving

the Doctor on the floe, but giving him directions to go back to land

with the wounded sledge and wait for him to return. And the Doctor did

it, like a spirited fellow, travelling back and forth for what he could

not take in one journey, as the man did in the story who had a peck of

corn, a goose, and a wolf to get across the river. Over ice, over

hummock, the Lieutenant went on his way with his dogs, not a bear nor a

seal nor a hare nor a wolf to feed them with; preserved meats, which

had been put up with dainty care for men and women, all he had for the

ravenous, tasteless creatures, who would have been more pleased with

blubber, came to Banks Land at last, but no game there; awful drifts;

shut up in the tent for a whole day, and he himself so sick he could

scarcely stand! There were but three of them in all; and the captain of

the sledge not unnaturally asked poor Pim, when he was at the worst,

"What shall I do, sir, if you die?" Not a very comforting question!

He did not die. He got a few hours' sleep, felt better and started

again, but had the discouragement of finding such tokens of an open

strait the last year that he felt sure that the ship he was going to

look for would be gone. One morning, he had been off for game for the

dogs unsuccessfully, and, when he came back to his men, learned that

they had seen seventeen deer. After them goes Pim; finds them to be

_three hares_, magnified by fog and mirage, and their long ears

answering for horns. This same day they got upon the Bay of Mercy. No

ship in sight! Right across it goes the Lieutenant to look for records;

when, at two in the afternoon, Robert Hoile sees something black up the

bay. Through the glass the Lieutenant makes it out to be a ship. They

change their direction at once. Over the ice towards her! He leaves the

sledge at three and goes on. How far it seems! At four he can see people

walking about, and a pile of stones and flag-staff on the beach. Keep

on, Pim: shall one never get there? At five he is within a hundred

yards of her, and no one has seen him. But just then the very persons

see him who ought to! Pim beckons, waves his arms as the Esquimaux do in

sign of friendship. Captain McClure and his lieutenant Haswell are

"taking their exercise," the chief business of those winters, and at

last see him! Pim is black as Erebus from the smoke of cooking in the

little tent. McClure owns, not to surprise only, but to a twinge of

dismay. "I paused in my advance," says he, "doubting who or what it

could be, a denizen of this or the other world." But this only lasts a

moment. Pim speaks. Brave man that he can. How his voice must have

choked, as if he were in a dream. "I am Lieutenant Pim, late of

'Herald.' Captain Kellett is at Melville Island." Well-chosen words,

Pim, to be sent in advance over the hundred yards of floe! Nothing about

the "Resolute,"--that would have confused them. But "Pim," "Herald," and

"Kellett" were among the last signs of England they had seen,--all this

was intelligible. An excellent little speech, which the brave man had

been getting ready, perhaps, as one does a telegraphic despatch, for the

hours that he had been walking over the floe to her. Then such shaking

hands, such a greeting. Poor McClure could not speak at first. One of

the men at work got the news on board; and up through the hatches poured

everybody, sick and well, to see the black stranger, and to hear his

news from England. It was nearly three years since they had seen any

civilized man but themselves.

The 28th of July, three years before, Commander McClure had sent his

last despatch to the Admiralty. He had then prophesied just what in

three years he had almost accomplished. In the winter of 1850 he had

discovered the Northwest Passage. He had come round into one branch of

it, Banks Straits, in the next summer; had gladly taken refuge on the

Bay of Mercy in a gale; and his ship had never left it since. Let it be

said, in passing, that most likely she is there now. In his last

despatches he had told the Admiralty not to be anxious about him if he

did not arrive home before the autumn of 1854. As it proved, that autumn

he did come with all his men, except those whom he had sent home before,

and those who had died. When Pim found them, all the crew but thirty

were under orders for marching, some to Baffin's Bay, some to the

Mackenzie River, on their return to England. McClure was going to stay

with the rest, and come home with the ship, if they could; if not, by

sledges to Port Leopold, and so by a steam-launch which he had seen left

there for Franklin in 1849. But the arrival of Mr. Pim put an end to all

these plans. We have his long despatch to the Admiralty explaining them,

finished only the day before Pim arrived. It gives the history of his

three years' exile from the world,--an exile crowded full of effective

work,--in a record which gives a noble picture of the man. The Queen

has made him Sir Robert Le Mesurier McClure since, in honor of his great

discovery.

Banks Land, or Baring Island, the two names belong to the same island,

on the shores of which McClure and his men had spent most of these two

years or more, is an island on which they were first of civilized men to

land. For people who are not very particular, the measurement of it

which we gave before, namely, that it is about the size and shape of

Ireland, is precise enough. There is high land in the interior probably,

as the winds from in shore are cold. The crew found coal and dwarf

willow which they could burn; lemmings, ptarmigan, hares, reindeer, and

musk-oxen, which they could eat.

"Farewell to the land where I often have wended

My way o'er its mountains and valleys of snow;

Farewell to the rocks and the hills I've ascended,

The bleak arctic homes of the buck and the doe;

Farewell to the deep glens where oft has resounded

The snow-bunting's song, as she carolled her lay

To hillside and plain, by the green sorrel bounded,

Till struck by the blast of a cold winter's day."

There is a bit of description of Banks Land, from the anthology of that

country, which, so far as we know, consists of two poems by a seaman

named Nelson, one of Captain McClure's crew. The highest temperature

ever observed on this "gem of the sea" was 53° in midsummer. The lowest

was 65° below zero in January, 1853; that day the thermometer did not

rise to 60° below, that month was never warmer than 16° below, and the

average of the month was 43° below. A pleasant climate to spend three

years in!

One day for talk was all that could be allowed, after Mr. Pim's amazing

appearance. On the 8th of April, he and his dogs, and Captain McClure

and a party, were ready to return to our friend the "Resolute." They

picked up Dr. Domville on the way; he had got the broken sledge mended,

and killed five musk-oxen, against they came along. He went on in the

dog-sledge to tell the news, but McClure and his men kept pace with

them; and he and Dr. Domville had the telling of the news together.

It was decided that the "Investigator" should be abandoned, and the

"Intrepid" and "Resolute" made room for her men. Glad greeting they gave

them too, as British seamen can give. More than half the crews were away

when the "Investigator's" parties came in, but by July everybody had

returned. They had found islands where the charts had guessed there was

sea, and sea where they had guessed there was land; had changed

peninsulas into islands and islands into peninsulas. Away off beyond the

seventy-eighth parallel, Mr. McClintock had christened the farthest dot

of land "Ireland's Eye," as if his native island were peering off into

the unknown there;--a great island, which will be our farthest now, for

years to come, had been named "Prince Patrick's Land," in honor of the

baby prince who was the youngest when they left home. Will he not be

tempted, when he is a man, to take a crew, like another Madoc, and, as

younger sons of queens should, go and settle upon this tempting

god-child? They had heard from Sir Edward Belcher's part of the

squadron; they had heard from England; had heard of everything but Sir

John Franklin. They had even found an ale-bottle of Captain Collinson's

expedition,--but not a stick nor straw to show where Franklin or his men

had lived or died. Two officers of the "Investigator" were sent home to

England this summer by a ship from Beechey Island, the head-quarters;

and thus we heard, in October, 1853, of the discovery of the Northwest

Passage.

After their crews were on board again, and the "Investigator's" sixty

stowed away also, the "Resolute" and "Intrepid" had a dreary summer of

it. The ice would not break up. They had hunting-parties on shore and

races on the floe; but the captain could not send the "Investigators"

home as he wanted to, in his steam tender. All his plans were made, and

made on a manly scale,--if only the ice would open. He built a

storehouse on the island for Collinson's people, or for you, reader, and

us, if we should happen there, and stored it well, and left this

record:--

"This is a house which I have named the 'Sailor's Home,' under the

especial patronage of my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty.

"_Here_ royal sailors and marines are fed, clothed, and receive double

pay for inhabiting it."

In that house is a little of everything, and a good deal of victuals and

drink; but nobody has been there since the last of the "Resolute's" men

came away.

At last, the 17th of August, a day of foot-racing and jumping in bags

and wrestling, all hands present, as at a sort of "Isthmian games,"

ended with a gale, a cracking up of ice, and the "Investigators" thought

they were on their way home, and Kellett thought he was to have a month

of summer yet. But no; "there is nothing certain in this navigation from

one hour to the next." The "Resolute" and "Intrepid" were never really

free of ice all that autumn; drove and drifted to and fro in Barrow's

Straits till the 12th of November; and then froze up, without anchoring,

off Cape Cockburn, perhaps one hundred and forty miles from their harbor

of the last winter. The log-book of that winter is a curious record; the

ingenuity of the officer in charge was well tasked to make one day

differ from another. Each day has the first entry for "ship's position"

thus: "In the floe off Cape Cockburn." And the blank for the second

entry, thus: "In the same position." Lectures, theatricals, schools,

&c., whiled away the time; but there could be no autumn travelling

parties, and not much hope for discovery in the summer.

Spring came. The captain went over ice in his little dog-sled to

Beechey Island, and received his directions to abandon his ships. It

appears that he would rather have sent most of his men forward, and with

a small crew brought the "Resolute" home that autumn or the next. But

Sir Edward Belcher considered his orders peremptory "that the safety of

the crews must preclude any idea of extricating the ships." Both ships

were to be abandoned. Two distant travelling parties were away, one at

the "Investigator," one looking for traces of Collinson, which they

found. Word was left for them, at a proper point, not to seek the ship

again, but to come on to Beechey Island. And at last, having fitted the

"Intrepid's" engines so that she could be under steam in two hours,

having stored both ships with equal proportions of provisions, and made

both vessels "ready for occupation," the captain calked down the

hatches, and with all the crew he had not sent on before,--forty-two

persons in all,--left her Monday, the 15th of May, 1854, and started

with the sledges for Beechey Island.

Poor old "Resolute"! All this gay company is gone who have made her

sides split with their laughter. Here is Harlequin's dress, lying in one

of the wardrooms, but there is nobody to dance Harlequin's dances. "Here

is a lovely clear day,--surely to-day they will come on deck and take a

meridian!" No, nobody comes. The sun grows hot on the decks; but it is

all one, nobody looks at the thermometer! "And so the poor ship was

left all alone." Such gay times she has had with all these brave young

men on board! Such merry winters, such a lightsome summer! So much fun,

so much nonsense! So much science and wisdom, and now it is all so

still! Is the poor "Resolute" conscious of the change? Does she miss the

races on the ice, the scientific lecture every Tuesday, the occasional

racket and bustle of the theatre, and the worship of every Sunday? Has

not she shared the hope of Captain Kellett, of McClure, and of the crew,

that she may _break out well!_ She sees the last sledge leave her. The

captain drives off his six dogs,--vanishes over the ice, and they are

all gone. "Will they not come back again?" says the poor ship. And she

looks wistfully across the ice to her little friend the steam tender

"Intrepid," and she sees there is no one there. "Intrepid! Intrepid!

have they really deserted us? We have served them so well, and have they

really left us alone? A great many were away travelling last year, but

they came home. Will not any of these come home now?" No, poor

"Resolute"! Not one of them ever came back again! Not one of them meant

to. Summer came. August came. No one can tell how soon, but some day or

other this her icy prison broke up, and the good ship found herself on

her own element again; shook herself proudly, we cannot doubt, nodded

joyfully across to the "Intrepid," and was free. But alas! there was no

master to take latitude and longitude, no helmsman at the wheel. In

clear letters cast in brass over her helm there are these words,

"England expects each man to do his duty." But here is no man to heed

the warning, and the rudder flaps this way and that way, no longer

directing her course, but stupidly swinging to and fro. And she drifts

here and there,--drifts out of sight of her little consort,--strands on

a bit of ice floe now, and then is swept off from it,--and finds

herself, without even the "Intrepid's" company, alone on these blue seas

with those white shores. But what utter loneliness! Poor "Resolute"! She

longed for freedom,--but what is freedom where there is no law? What is

freedom without a helmsman! And the "Resolute" looks back so sadly to

the old days when she had a master. And the short bright summer passes.

And again she sees the sun set from her decks. And now even her topmasts

see it set. And now it does not rise to her deck. And the next day it

does not rise to her topmast. Winter and night together! She has known

them before! But now it is winter and night and loneliness all together.

This horrid ice closes up round her again. And there is no one to bring

her into harbor,--she is out in the open sound. If the ice drifts west,

she must go west. If it goes east, she must go east. Her seeming freedom

is over, and for that long winter she is chained again. But her heart is

true to old England. And when she can go east, she is so happy! and when

she must go west, she is so sad! Eastward she does go! Southward she

does go! True to the instinct which sends us all home, she tracks

undirected and without a sail fifteen hundred miles of that sea, without

a beacon, which separates her from her own. And so goes a dismal year.

"Perhaps another spring they will come and find me out, and fix things

below. It is getting dreadfully damp down there; and I cannot keep the

guns bright and the floors dry." No, good old "Resolute." May and June

pass off the next year, and nobody comes; and here you are all alone out

in the bay, drifting in this dismal pack. July and August,--the days are

growing shorter again. "Will nobody come and take care of me, and cut

off these horrid blocks of ice, and see to these sides of bacon in the

hold, and all these mouldy sails, and this powder, and the bread and the

spirit that I have kept for them so well? It is September, and the sun

begins to set again. And here is another of those awful gales. Will it

be my very last? I all alone here,--who have done so much,--and if they

would only take care of me I can do so much more. Will nobody come?

Nobody?... What! Is it ice blink,--are my poor old lookouts blind? Is

not there the 'Intrepid'? Dear 'Intrepid,' I will never look down on you

again! No! there is no smoke-stack, it is not the 'Intrepid.' But it is

somebody. Pray see me, good somebody. Are you a Yankee whaler? I am glad

to see the Yankee whalers. I remember the Yankee whalers very

pleasantly. We had a happy summer together once.... It will be dreadful

if they do not see me! But this ice, this wretched ice! They do see

me,--I know they see me, but they cannot get at me. Do not go away, good

Yankees; pray come and help me. I know I can get out, if you will help a

little.... But now it is a whole week and they do not come! Are there

any Yankees, or am I getting crazy? I have heard them talk of crazy old

ships, in my young days.... No! I am not crazy. They are coming! they

are coming. Brave Yankees! over the hummocks, down into the sludge. Do

not give it up for the cold. There is coal below, and we will have a

fire in the Sylvester, and in the captain's cabin.... There is a horrid

lane of water. They have not got a Halkett. O, if one of these boats of

mine would only start for them, instead of lying so stupidly on my deck

here! But the men are not afraid of water! See them ferry over on that

ice block! Come on, good friends! Welcome, whoever you be,--Dane, Dutch,

French, or Yankee, come on! come on! It is coming up a gale, but I can

bear a gale. Up the side, men. I wish I could let down the gangway

alone. But here are all these blocks of ice piled up,--you can scramble

over them! Why do you stop? Do not be afraid. I will make you very

comfortable and jolly. Do not stay talking there. Pray come in. There is

port in the captain's cabin, and a little preserved meat in the pantry.

You must be hungry; pray come in! O, he is coming, and now all four are

coming. It would be dreadful if they had gone back! They are on deck.

Now I shall go home! How lonely it has been!"

It was true enough that when Mr. Quail, the brother of the captain of

the "McLellan," whom the "Resolute" had befriended, the mate of the

George Henry, whaler, whose master, Captain Buddington, had discovered

the "Resolute" in the ice, came to her after a hard day's journey with

his men, the men faltered with a little superstitious feeling, and

hesitated for a minute about going on board. But the poor lonely ship

wooed them too lovingly, and they climbed over the broken ice and came

on deck. She was lying over on her larboard side, with a heavy weight of

ice holding her down. Hatches and companion were made fast, as Captain

Kellett had left them. But, knocking open the companion, groping down

stairs to the after cabin they found their way to the captain's table;

somebody put his hand on a box of lucifers, struck a light, and

revealed--books scattered in confusion, a candle standing, which he

lighted at once, the glasses and the decanters from which Kellett and

his officers had drunk good by to the vessel. The whalemen filled them

again, and undoubtedly felt less discouraged. Meanwhile night came on,

and a gale arose. So hard did it blow, that for two days these four were

the whole crew of the "Resolute," and it was not till the 19th of

September that they returned to their own ship, and reported what their

prize was.

All these ten days, since Captain Buddington had first seen her, the

vessels had been nearing each other. On the 19th he boarded her himself;

found that in her hold, on the larboard side, was a good deal of ice; on

the starboard side there seemed to be water. In fact, her tanks had

burst from the extreme cold; and she was full of water, nearly to her

lower deck. Everything that could move from its place had moved;

everything was wet; everything that would mould was mouldy. "A sort of

perspiration" settled on the beams above. Clothes were wringing wet. The

captain's party made a fire in Captain Kellett's stove, and soon started

a sort of shower from the vapor with which it filled the air. The

"Resolute" has, however, four fine force-pumps. For three days the

captain and six men worked fourteen hours a day on one of these, and had

the pleasure of finding that they freed her of water,--that she was

tight still. They cut away upon the masses of ice; and on the 23d of

September, in the evening, she freed herself from her encumbrances, and

took an even keel. This was off the west shore of Baffin's Bay, in

latitude 67°. On the shortest tack she was twelve hundred miles from

where Captain Kellett left her.

There was work enough still to be done. The rudder was to be shipped,

the rigging to be made taut, sail to be set; and it proved, by the way,

that the sail on the yards was much of it still serviceable, while a

suit of new linen sails below were greatly injured by moisture. In a

week more they had her ready to make sail. The pack of ice still drifted

with both ships; but on the 21st of October, after a long northwest

gale, the "Resolute" was free,--more free than she had been for more

than two years.

Her "last voyage" is almost told. Captain Buddington had resolved to

bring her home. He had picked ten men from the "George Henry," leaving

her fifteen, and with a rough tracing of the American coast drawn on a

sheet of foolscap, with his lever watch and a quadrant for his

instruments, he squared off for New London. A rough, hard passage they

had of it. The ship's ballast was gone, by the bursting of the tanks;

she was top-heavy and under manned. He spoke a British whaling bark, and

by her sent to Captain Kellett his epaulettes, and to his own owners

news that he was coming. They had heavy gales and head winds, were

driven as far down as the Bermudas; the water left in the ship's tanks

was brackish, and it needed all the seasoning which the ship's chocolate

would give to make it drinkable. "For sixty hours at a time," says the

spirited captain, "I frequently had no sleep"; but his perseverance was

crowned with success at last, and on the night of the 23d-24th of

December he made the light off the magnificent harbor from which he

sailed; and on Sunday morning, the 24th, dropped anchor in the Thames,

opposite _New_ London, ran up the royal ensign on the shorn masts of the

"Resolute," and the good people of the town knew that he and his were

safe, and that one of the victories of peace was won.

As the fine ship lies opposite the piers of that beautiful town, she

attracts visitors from everywhere, and is, indeed, a very remarkable

curiosity. Seals were at once placed, and very properly, on the

captain's book-cases, lockers, and drawers, and wherever private

property might be injured by wanton curiosity, and two keepers are on

duty on the vessel, till her destination is decided. But nothing is

changed from what she was when she came into harbor. And, from stem to

stern, every detail of her equipment is a curiosity, to the sailor or to

the landsman. The candlestick in the cabin is not like a Yankee

candlestick. The hawse hole for the chain cable is fitted as has not

been seen before. And so of everything between. There is the aspect of

wet over everything now, after months of ventilation;--the rifles, which

were last fired at musk-oxen in Melville Island, are red with rust, as

if they had lain in the bottom of the sea; the volume of Shakespeare,

which you find in an officer's berth, has a damp feel, as if you had

been reading it in the open air in a March north-easter. The old seamen

look with most amazement, perhaps, on the preparations for

amusement,--the juggler's cups and balls, or Harlequin's spangled dress;

the quiet landsman wonders at the gigantic ice-saws, at the cast-off

canvas boots, the long thick Arctic stockings. It seems almost wrong to

go into Mr. Hamilton's wardroom, and see how he arranged his soap-cup

and his tooth-brush; and one does not tell of it, if he finds on a blank

leaf the secret prayer a sister wrote down for the brother to whom she

gave a prayer-book. There is a good deal of disorder now,--thanks to her

sudden abandonment, and perhaps to her three months' voyage home. A

little union-jack lies over a heap of unmended and unwashed

underclothes; when Kellett left the ship, he left his country's flag

over his arm-chair as if to keep possession. Two officers' swords and a

pair of epaulettes were on the cabin table. Indeed, what is there not

there,--which should make an Arctic winter endurable,--make a long night

into day,--or while long days away?

The ship is stanch and sound. The "last voyage" which we have described

will not, let us hope, be the last voyage of her career. But wherever

she goes, under the English flag or under our own, she will scarcely

ever crowd more adventure into one cruise than into that which sealed

the discovery of the Northwest Passage; which gave new lands to England,

nearest to the pole of all she has; which spent more than a year, no man

knows where, self-governed and unguided; and which, having begun under

the strict _régime_ of the English navy, ended under the remarkable

mutual rules, adopted by common consent, in the business of American

whalemen.

Is it not worth noting that in this chivalry of Arctic adventure, the

ships which have been wrecked have been those of the fight or horror?

They are the "Fury," the "Victory," the "Erebus," the "Terror." But the

ships which never failed their crews,--which, for all that man knows,

are as sound now as ever,--bear the names of peaceful adventure; the

"Hecla," the "Enterprise," and "Investigator," the "Assistance" and

"Resolute," the "Pioneer" and "Intrepid," and our "Advance" and "Rescue"

and "Arctic," never threatened any one, even in their names. And they

never failed the men who commanded them or who sailed in them.

FOOTNOTE:

[15] Tetrao lagopus.

MY DOUBLE, AND HOW HE UNDID ME

ONE OF THE INGHAM PAPERS.

[A Boston journal, in noticing this story, called it improbable I

think it is. But I think the moral important. It was first

published in the Atlantic Monthly for September, 1859.]

It is not often that I trouble the readers of the Atlantic Monthly. I

should not trouble them now, but for the importunities of my wife, who

"feels to insist" that a duty to society is unfulfilled, till I have

told why I had to have a double, and how he undid me. She is sure, she

says, that intelligent persons cannot understand that pressure upon

public servants which alone drives any man into the employment of a

double. And while I fear she thinks, at the bottom of her heart, that my

fortunes will never be remade, she has a faint hope that, as another

Rasselas, I may teach a lesson to future publics, from which they may

profit, though we die. Owing to the behavior of my double, or, if you

please, to that public pressure which compelled me to employ him, I have

plenty of leisure to write this communication.

I am, or rather was, a minister, of the Sandemanian connection. I was

settled in the active, wide-awake town of Naguadavick, on one of the

finest water-powers in Maine. We used to call it a Western town in the

heart of the civilization of New England. A charming place it was and

is. A spirited, brave young parish had I; and it seemed as if we might

have all "the joy of eventful living" to our heart's content.

Alas! how little we knew on the day of my ordination, and in those

halcyon moments of our first housekeeping! To be the confidential friend

in a hundred families in the town,--cutting the social trifle, as my

friend Haliburton says, "from the top of the whipped syllabub to the

bottom of the sponge-cake, which is the foundation,"--to keep abreast of

the thought of the age in one's study, and to do one's best on Sunday to

interweave that thought with the active life of an active town, and to

inspirit both and make both infinite by glimpses of the Eternal Glory,

seemed such an exquisite forelook into one's life! Enough to do, and all

so real and so grand! If this vision could only have lasted!

The truth is, that this vision was not in itself a delusion, nor,

indeed, half bright enough. If one could only have been left to do his

own business, the vision would have accomplished itself and brought out

new paraheliacal visions, each as bright as the original. The misery was

and is, as we found out, I and Polly, before long, that besides the

vision, and besides the usual human and finite failures in life (such as

breaking the old pitcher that came over in the "Mayflower," and putting

into the fire the Alpenstock with which her father climbed Mont

Blanc),--besides these, I say (imitating the style of Robinson Crusoe),

there were pitchforked in on us a great rowen-heap of humbugs, handed

down from some unknown seed-time, in which we were expected, and I

chiefly, to fulfil certain public functions before the community, of the

character of those fulfilled by the third row of supernumeraries who

stand behind the Sepoys in the spectacle of the "Cataract of the

Ganges." They were the duties, in a word, which one performs as member

of one or another social class or subdivision, wholly distinct from what

one does as A. by himself A. What invisible power put these functions on

me, it would be very hard to tell. But such power there was and is. And

I had not been at work a year before I found I was living two lives, one

real and one merely functional,--for two sets of people, one my parish,

whom I loved, and the other a vague public, for whom I did not care two

straws. All this was in a vague notion, which everybody had and has,

that this second life would eventually bring out some great results,

unknown at present, to somebody somewhere.

Crazed by this duality of life, I first read Dr. Wigan on the "Duality

of the Brain," hoping that I could train one side of my head to do these

outside jobs, and the other to do my intimate and real duties. For

Richard Greenough once told me, that, in studying for the statue of

Franklin, he found that the left side of the great man's face was

philosophic and reflective, and the right side funny and smiling. If you

will go and look at the bronze statue, you will find he has repeated

this observation there for posterity. The eastern profile is the

portrait of the statesman Franklin, the western of poor Richard. But Dr.

Wigan does not go into these niceties of this subject, and I failed. It

was then that, on my wife's suggestion, I resolved to look out for a

Double.

I was, at first, singularly successful. We happened to be recreating at

Stafford Springs that summer. We rode out one day, for one of the

relaxations of that watering-place, to the great Monson Poorhouse. We

were passing through one of the large halls, when my destiny was

fulfilled!

He was not shaven. He had on no spectacles. He was dressed in a green

baize roundabout and faded blue overalls, worn sadly at the knee. But I

saw at once that he was of my height, five feet four and a half. He had

black hair, worn off by his hat. So have and have not I. He stooped in

walking. So do I. His hands were large, and mine. And--choicest gift of

Fate in all--he had, not "a strawberry-mark on his left arm," but a cut

from a juvenile brickbat over his right eye, slightly affecting the play

of that eyebrow. Reader, so have I! My fate was sealed!

A word with Mr. Holley, one of the inspectors, settled the whole thing.

It proved that this Dennis Shea was a harmless, amiable fellow, of the

class known as shiftless, who had sealed his fate by marrying a dumb

wife, who was at that moment ironing in the laundry. Before I left

Stafford, I had hired both for five years. We had applied to Judge

Pynchon, then the probate judge at Springfield, to change the name of

Dennis Shea to Frederic Ingham. We had explained to the Judge, what was

the precise truth, that an eccentric gentleman wished to adopt Dennis,

under this new name, into his family. It never occurred to him that

Dennis might be more than fourteen years old. And thus, to shorten this

preface, when we returned at night to my parsonage at Naguadavick, there

entered Mrs. Ingham, her new dumb laundress, myself, who am Mr. Frederic

Ingham, and my double, who was Mr. Frederic Ingham by as good right as

I.

O the fun we had the next morning in shaving his beard to my pattern,

cutting his hair to match mine, and teaching him how to wear and how to

take off gold-bowed spectacles! Really, they were electro-plate, and the

glass was plain (for the poor fellow's eyes were excellent). Then in

four successive afternoons I taught him four speeches. I had found these

would be quite enough for the supernumerary-Sepoy line of life, and it

was well for me they were; for though he was good-natured, he was very

shiftless, and it was, as our national proverb says, "like pulling

teeth" to teach him. But at the end of the next week he could say, with

quite my easy and frisky air,--

1. "Very well, thank you. And you?" This for an answer to casual

salutations.

2. "I am very glad you liked it."

3. "There has been so much said, and, on the whole, so well said, that I

will not occupy the time."

4. "I agree, in general, with my friend the other side of the room."

At first I had a feeling that I was going to be at great cost for

clothing him. But it proved, of course, at once, that, whenever he was

out, I should be at home. And I went, during the bright period of his

success, to so few of those awful pageants which require a black

dress-coat and what the ungodly call, after Mr. Dickens, a white choker,

that in the happy retreat of my own dressing-gowns and jackets my days

went by as happily and cheaply as those of another Thalaba. And Polly

declares there was never a year when the tailoring cost so little. He

lived (Dennis, not Thalaba) in his wife's room over the kitchen. He had

orders never to show himself at that window. When he appeared in the

front of the house, I retired to my sanctissimum and my dressing-gown.

In short, the Dutchman and his wife, in the old weather-box, had not

less to do with each other than he and I. He made the furnace-fire and

split the wood before daylight; then he went to sleep again, and slept

late; then came for orders, with a red silk bandanna tied round his

head, with his overalls on, and his dress-coat and spectacles off. If we

happened to be interrupted, no one guessed that he was Frederic Ingham

as well as I; and, in the neighborhood, there grew up an impression that

the minister's Irishman worked daytimes in the factory-village at New

Coventry. After I had given him his orders, I never saw him till the

next day.

I launched him by sending him to a meeting of the Enlightenment Board.

The Enlightenment Board consists of seventy-four members, of whom

sixty-seven are necessary to form a quorum. One becomes a member under

the regulations laid down in old Judge Dudley's will. I became one by

being ordained pastor of a church in Naguadavick. You see you cannot

help yourself, if you would. At this particular time we had had four

successive meetings, averaging four hours each,--wholly occupied in

whipping in a quorum. At the first only eleven men were present; at the

next, by force of three circulars, twenty-seven; at the third, thanks to

two days' canvassing by Auchmuty and myself, begging men to come, we had

sixty. Half the others were in Europe. But without a quorum we could do

nothing. All the rest of us waited grimly for our four hours, and

adjourned without any action. At the fourth meeting we had flagged, and

only got fifty-nine together. But on the first appearance of my

double,--whom I sent on this fatal Monday to the fifth meeting,--he was

the _sixty-seventh_ man who entered the room. He was greeted with a

storm of applause! The poor fellow had missed his way,--read the street

signs ill through his spectacles (very ill, in fact, without them),--and

had not dared to inquire. He entered the room,--finding the president

and secretary holding to their chairs two judges of the Supreme Court,

who were also members _ex officio_, and were begging leave to go away.

On his entrance all was changed. _Presto_, the by-laws were suspended,

and the Western property was given away. Nobody stopped to converse with

him. He voted, as I had charged him to do, in every instance, with the

minority. I won new laurels as a man of sense, though a little

unpunctual,--and Dennis, _alias_ Ingham, returned to the parsonage,

astonished to see with how little wisdom the world is governed. He cut a

few of my parishioners in the street; but he had his glasses off, and I

am known to be near-sighted. Eventually he recognized them more readily

than I.

I "set him again" at the exhibition of the New Coventry Academy; and

here he undertook a "speaking part,"--as, in my boyish, worldly days, I

remember the bills used to say of Mlle. Celeste. We are all trustees of

the New Coventry Academy; and there has lately been "a good deal of

feeling" because the Sandemanian trustees did not regularly attend the

exhibitions. It has been intimated, indeed, that the Sandemanians are

leaning towards Free-Will, and that we have, therefore, neglected these

semiannual exhibitions, while there is no doubt that Auchmuty last year

went to Commencement at Waterville. Now the head master at New Coventry

is a real good fellow, who knows a Sanskrit root when he sees it, and

often cracks etymologies with me,--so that, in strictness, I ought to go

to their exhibitions. But think, reader, of sitting through three long

July days in that Academy chapel, following the programme from

TUESDAY MORNING. _English Composition._ "SUNSHINE." Miss Jones.

round to

_Trio on Three Pianos._ Duel from the Opera of "Midshipman Easy."

_Marryat._

coming in at nine, Thursday evening! Think of this, reader, for men who

know the world is trying to go backward, and who would give their lives

if they could help it on! Well! The double had succeeded so well at the

Board, that I sent him to the Academy. (Shade of Plato, pardon!) He

arrived early on Tuesday, when, indeed, few but mothers and clergymen

are generally expected, and returned in the evening to us, covered with

honors. He had dined at the right hand of the chairman, and he spoke in

high terms of the repast. The chairman had expressed his interest in the

French conversation. "I am very glad you liked it," said Dennis; and the

poor chairman, abashed, supposed the accent had been wrong. At the end

of the day, the gentlemen present had been called upon for

speeches,--the Rev. Frederic Ingham first, as it happened; upon which

Dennis had risen, and had said, "There has been so much said, and, on

the whole, so well said, that I will not occupy the time." The girls

were delighted, because Dr. Dabney, the year before, had given them at

this occasion a scolding on impropriety of behavior at lyceum lectures.

They all declared Mr. Ingliam was a love,--and _so_ handsome! (Dennis is

good-looking.) Three of them, with arms behind the others' waists,

followed him up to the wagon he rode home in; and a little girl with a

blue sash had been sent to give him a rosebud. After this _début_ in

speaking, he went to the exhibition for two days more, to the mutual

satisfaction of all concerned. Indeed, Polly reported that he had

pronounced the trustees' dinners of a higher grade than those of the

parsonage. When the next term began, I found six of the Academy girls

had obtained permission to come across the river and attend our church.

But this arrangement did not long continue.

After this he went to several Commencements for me, and ate the dinners

provided; he sat through three of our Quarterly Conventions for

me,--always voting judiciously, by the simple rule mentioned above, of

siding with the minority. And I, meanwhile, who had before been losing

caste among my friends, as holding myself aloof from the associations of

the body, began to rise in everybody's favor. "Ingham's a good

fellow,--always on hand"; "never talks much, but does the right thing at

the right time"; "is not as unpunctual as he used to be,--he comes

early, and sits through to the end." "He has got over his old talkative

habit, too. I spoke to a friend of his about it once; and I think Ingham

took it kindly," etc., etc.

This voting power of Dennis was particularly valuable at the quarterly

meetings of the proprietors of the Naguadavick Ferry. My wife inherited

from her father some shares in that enterprise, which is not yet fully

developed, though it doubtless will become a very valuable property. The

law of Maine then forbade stockholders to appear by proxy at such

meetings. Polly disliked to go, not being, in fact, a "hens'-rights

hen," transferred her stock to me. I, after going once, disliked it more

than she. But Dennis went to the next meeting, and liked it very much.

He said the arm-chairs were good, the collation good, and the free rides

to stockholders pleasant. He was a little frightened when they first

took him upon one of the ferry-boats, but after two or three quarterly

meetings he became quite brave.

Thus far I never had any difficulty with him. Indeed, being, as I

implied, of that type which is called shiftless, he was only too happy

to be told daily what to do, and to be charged not to be forthputting or

in any way original in his discharge of that duty. He learned, however,

to discriminate between the lines of his life, and very much preferred

these stockholders' meetings and trustees' dinners and Commencement

collations to another set of occasions, from which he used to beg off

most piteously. Our excellent brother, Dr. Fillmore, had taken a notion

at this time that our Sandemanian churches needed more expression of

mutual sympathy. He insisted upon it that we were remiss. He said, that,

if the Bishop came to preach at Naguadavick, all the Episcopal clergy of

the neighborhood were present; if Dr. Pond came, all the Congregational

clergymen turned out to hear him; if Dr. Nichols, all the Unitarians;

and he thought we owed it to each other, that, whenever there was an

occasional service at a Sandemanian church, the other brethren should

all, if possible, attend. "It looked well," if nothing more. Now this

really meant that I had not been to hear one of Dr. Fillmore's lectures

on the Ethnology of Religion. He forgot that he did not hear one of my

course on the "Sandemanianism of Anselm." But I felt badly when he said

it; and afterwards I always made Dennis go to hear all the brethren

preach, when I was not preaching myself. This was what he took

exceptions to,--the only thing, as I said, which he ever did except to.

Now came the advantage of his long morning-nap, and of the green tea

with which Polly supplied the kitchen. But he would plead, so humbly, to

be let off, only from one or two! I never excepted him, however. I knew

the lectures were of value, and I thought it best he should be able to

keep the connection.

Polly is more rash than I am, as the reader has observed in the outset

of this memoir. She risked Dennis one night under the eyes of her own

sex. Governor Gorges had always been very kind to us, and, when he gave

his great annual party to the town, asked us. I confess I hated to go. I

was deep in the new volume of Pfeiffer's "Mystics," which Haliburton had

just sent me from Boston. "But how rude," said Polly, "not to return the

Governor's civility and Mrs. Gorges's, when they will be sure to ask why

you are away!" Still I demurred, and at last she, with the wit of Eve

and of Semiramis conjoined, let me off by saying that, if I would go in

with her, and sustain the initial conversations with the Governor and

the ladies staying there, she would risk Dennis for the rest of the

evening. And that was just what we did. She took Dennis in training all

that afternoon, instructed him in fashionable conversation, cautioned

him against the temptations of the supper-table,--and at nine in the

evening he drove us all down in the carryall. I made the grand

star-_entrée_ with Polly and the pretty Walton girls, who were staying

with us. We had put Dennis into a great rough top-coat, without his

glasses; and the girls never dreamed, in the darkness, of looking at

him. He sat in the carriage, at the door, while we entered. I did the

agreeable to Mrs. Gorges, was introduced to her niece, Miss Fernanda; I

complimented Judge Jeffries on his decision in the great case of

D'Aulnay _vs._ Laconia Mining Company; I stepped into the dressing-room

for a moment, stepped out for another, walked home after a nod with

Dennis and tying the horse to a pump; and while I walked home, Mr.

Frederic Ingham, my double, stepped in through the library into the

Gorges's grand saloon.

Oh! Polly died of laughing as she told me of it at midnight! And even

here, where I have to teach my hands to hew the beech for stakes to

fence our cave, she dies of laughing as she recalls it,--and says that

single occasion was worth all we have paid for it. Gallant Eve that she

is! She joined Dennis at the library-door, and in an instant presented

him to Dr. Ochterlony, from Baltimore, who was on a visit in town, and

was talking with her as Dennis came in. "Mr. Ingham would like to hear

what you were telling us about your success among the German

population." And Dennis bowed and said, in spite of a scowl from Polly,

"I'm very glad you liked it." But Dr. Ochterlony did not observe, and

plunged into the tide of explanation; Dennis listened like a

prime-minister, and bowing like a mandarin, which is, I suppose, the

same thing. Polly declared it was just like Haliburton's Latin

conversation with the Hungarian minister, of which he is very fond of

telling. "_Quæne sit historia Reformationis in Ungariâ?_" quoth

Haliburton, after some thought. And his _confrère_ replied gallantly,

"_In seculo decimo tertio_," etc., etc., etc.; and from _decimo

tertio_[16] to the nineteenth century and a half lasted till the

oysters came. So was it that before Dr. Ochterlony came to the

"success," or near it, Governor Gorges came to Dennis, and asked him to

hand Mrs. Jeffries down to supper, a request which he heard with great

joy.

Polly was skipping round the room, I guess, gay as a lark. Auchmuty came

to her "in pity for poor Ingham," who was so bored by the stupid

pundit,--and Auchmuty could not understand why I stood it so long. But

when Dennis took Mrs. Jeffries down, Polly could not resist standing

near them. He was a little flustered, till the sight of the eatables and

drinkables gave him the same Mercian courage which it gave Diggory. A

little excited then, he attempted one or two of his speeches to the

Judge's lady. But little he knew how hard it was to get in even a

_promptu_ there edgewise. "Very well, I thank you," said he, after the

eating elements were adjusted; "and you?" And then did not he have to

hear about the mumps, and the measles, and arnica, and belladonna, and

chamomile-flower, and dodecatheon, till she changed oysters for salad;

and then about the old practice and the new, and what her sister said,

and what her sister's friend said, and what the physician to her

sister's friend said, and then what was said by the brother of the

sister of the physician of the friend of her sister, exactly as if it

had been in Ollendorff? There was a moment's pause, as she declined

Champagne. "I am very glad you liked it," said Dennis again, which he

never should have said but to one who complimented a sermon. "Oh! you

are so sharp, Mr. Ingham! No! I never drink any wine at all,--except

sometimes in summer a little currant shrub,--from our own currants, you

know. My own mother,--that is, I call her my own mother, because, you

know, I do not remember," etc., etc., etc.; till they came to the

candied orange at the end of the feast, when Dennis, rather confused,

thought he must say something, and tried No. 4,--"I agree, in general,

with my friend the other side of the room,"--which he never should have

said but at a public meeting. But Mrs. Jeffries, who never listens

expecting to understand, caught him up instantly with "Well, I'm sure my

husband returns the compliment; he always agrees with you,--though we do

worship with the Methodists; but you know, Mr. Ingham," etc., etc.,

etc., till the move up-stairs; and as Dennis led her through the hall,

he was scarcely understood by any but Polly, as he said, "There has been

so much said, and, on the whole, so well said, that I will not occupy

the time."

His great resource the rest of the evening was standing in the library,

carrying on animated conversations with one and another in much the same

way. Polly had initiated him in the mysteries of a discovery of mine,

that it is not necessary to finish your sentences in a crowd, but by a

sort of mumble, omitting sibilants and dentals. This, indeed, if your

words fail you, answers even in public extempore speech, but better

where other talking is going on. Thus: "We missed you at the Natural

History Society, Ingham." Ingham replies, "I am very gligloglum, that

is, that you were mmmmm." By gradually dropping the voice, the

interlocutor is compelled to supply the answer. "Mrs. Ingham, I hope

your friend Augusta is better." Augusta has not been ill. Polly cannot

think of explaining, however, and answers, "Thank you, Ma'am; she is

very rearason wewahwewoh," in lower and lower tones. And Mrs.

Throckmorton, who forgot the subject of which she spoke as soon as she

asked the question, is quite satisfied. Dennis could see into the

card-room, and came to Polly to ask if he might not go and play

all-fours. But, of course, she sternly refused. At midnight they came

home delighted,--Polly, as I said, wild to tell me the story of the

victory; only both the pretty Walton girls said, "Cousin Frederic, you

did not come near me all the evening."

We always called him Dennis at home, for convenience, though his real

name was Frederic Ingham, as I have explained. When the election-day

came round, however, I found that by some accident there was only one

Frederic Ingham's name on the voting-list; and as I was quite busy that

day in writing some foreign letters to Halle, I thought I would forego

my privilege of suffrage, and stay quietly at home, telling Dennis that

he might use the record on the voting-list, and vote. I gave him a

ticket, which I told him he might use, if he liked to. That was that

very sharp election in Maine which the readers of the Atlantic so well

remember, and it had been intimated in public that the ministers would

do well not to appear at the polls. Of course, after that, we had to

appear by self or proxy. Still, Naguadavick was not then a city, and

this standing in a double queue at town-meeting several hours to vote

was a bore of the first water; and so when I found that there was but

one Frederic Ingham on the list, and that one of us must give up, I

stayed at home and finished the letters (which, indeed, procured for

Fothergill his coveted appointment of Professor of Astronomy at

Leavenworth), and I gave Dennis, as we called him, the chance. Something

in the matter gave a good deal of popularity to the Frederic Ingham

name; and at the adjourned election, next week, Frederic Ingham was

chosen to the legislature. Whether this was I or Dennis I never really

knew. My friends seemed to think it was I; but I felt that as Dennis had

done the popular thing, he was entitled to the honor; so I sent him to

Augusta when the time came, and he took the oaths. And a very valuable

member he made. They appointed him on the Committee on Parishes; but I

wrote a letter for him, resigning, on the ground that he took an

interest in our claim to the stumpage in the minister's sixteenths of

Gore A, next No. 7, in the 10th Range. He never made any speeches, and

always voted with the minority, which was what he was sent to do. He

made me and himself a great many good friends, some of whom I did not

afterwards recognize as quickly as Dennis did my parishioners. On one or

two occasions, when there was wood to saw at home, I kept him at home;

but I took those occasions to go to Augusta myself. Finding myself often

in his vacant seat at these times, I watched the proceedings with a good

deal of care; and once was so much excited that I delivered my somewhat

celebrated speech on the Central School-District question, a speech of

which the "State of Maine" printed some extra copies. I believe there is

no formal rule permitting strangers to speak; but no one objected.

Dennis himself, as I said, never spoke at all. But our experience this

session led me to think that if, by some such "general understanding" as

the reports speak of in legislation daily, every member of Congress

might leave a double to sit through those deadly sessions and answer to

roll-calls and do the legitimate party-voting, which appears stereotyped

in the regular list of Ashe, Bocock, Black, etc., we should gain

decidedly in working-power. As things stand, the saddest State prison I

ever visit is that Representatives' Chamber in Washington. If a man

leaves for an hour, twenty "correspondents" may be howling, "Where was

Mr. Pendergrast when the Oregon bill passed?" And if poor Pendergrast

stays there! Certainly the worst use you can make of a man is to put him

in prison!

I know, indeed, that public men of the highest rank have resorted to

this expedient long ago. Dumas's novel of the "Iron Mask" turns on the

brutal imprisonment of Louis the Fourteenth's double. There seems little

doubt, in our own history, that it was the real General Pierce who shed

tears when the delegate from Lawrence explained to him the sufferings of

the people there, and only General Pierce's double who had given the

orders for the assault on that town, which was invaded the next day. My

charming friend, George Withers, has, I am almost sure, a double, who

preaches his afternoon sermons for him. This is the reason that the

theology often varies so from that of the forenoon. But that double is

almost as charming as the original. Some of the most well-defined men,

who stand out most prominently on the background of history, are in this

way stereoscopic men, who owe their distinct relief to the slight

differences between the doubles. All this I know. My present suggestion

is simply the great extension of the system, so that all public

machine-work may be done by it.

But I see I loiter on my story, which is rushing to the plunge. Let me

stop an instant more, however, to recall, were it only to myself, that

charming year while all was yet well. After the double had become a

matter of course, for nearly twelve months before he undid me, what a

year it was! Full of active life, full of happy love, of the hardest

work, of the sweetest sleep, and the fulfilment of so many of the fresh

aspirations and dreams of boyhood! Dennis went to every school-committee

meeting, and sat through all those late wranglings which used to keep me

up till midnight and awake till morning. He attended all the lectures to

which foreign exiles sent me tickets begging me to come for the love of

Heaven and of Bohemia. He accepted and used all the tickets for charity

concerts which were sent to me. He appeared everywhere where it was

specially desirable that "our denomination," or "our party," or "our

class," or "our family," or "our street," or "our town," or "our

country," or "our State," should be fully represented. And I fell back

to that charming life which in boyhood one dreams of, when he supposes

he shall do his own duty and make his own sacrifices, without being tied

up with those of other people. My rusty Sanskrit, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek,

Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and English began to take

polish. Heavens! how little I had done with them while I attended to my

_public_ duties! My calls on my parishioners became the friendly,

frequent, homelike sociabilities they were meant to be, instead of the

hard work of a man goaded to desperation by the sight of his lists of

arrears. And preaching! what a luxury preaching was when I had on Sunday

the whole result of an individual, personal week, from which to speak to

a people whom all that week I had been meeting as hand-to-hand

friend;--I, never tired on Sunday, and in condition to leave the sermon

at home if I chose, and preach it extempore, as all men should do

always. Indeed, I wonder, when I think that a sensible people, like

ours,--really more attached to their clergy than they were in the lost

days, when the Mathers and Nortons were noblemen,--should choose to

neutralize so much of their ministers' lives, and destroy so much of

their early training, by this undefined passion for seeing them in

public. It springs from our balancing of sects. If a spirited

Episcopalian takes an interest in the almshouse, and is put on the Poor

Board, every other denomination must have a minister there, lest the

poorhouse be changed into St. Paul's Cathedral. If a Sandemanian is

chosen president of the Young Men's Library, there must be a Methodist

vice-president and a Baptist secretary. And if a Universalist

Sunday-School Convention collects five hundred delegates, the next

Congregationalist Sabbath-School Conference must be as large, "lest

'they'--whoever _they_ may be--should think 'we'--whoever _we_ may

be--are going down."

Freed from these necessities, that happy year I began to know my wife by

sight. We saw each other sometimes. In those long mornings, when Dennis

was in the study explaining to map-peddlers that I had eleven maps of

Jerusalem already, and to school-book agents that I would see them

hanged before I would be bribed to introduce their text-books into the

schools,--she and I were at work together, as in those old dreamy

days,--and in these of our log-cabin again. But all this could not

last,--and at length poor Dennis, my double, overtasked in turn, undid

me.

It was thus it happened. There is an excellent fellow, once a

minister,--I will call him Isaacs,--who deserves well of the world till

he dies, and after, because he once, in a real exigency, did the right

thing, in the right way, at the right time, as no other man could do it.

In the world's great football match, the ball by chance found him

loitering on the outside of the field; he closed with it, "camped" it,

charged it home,--yes, right through the other side,--not disturbed, not

frightened by his own success,--and breathless found himself a great

man, as the Great Delta rang applause. But he did not find himself a

rich man; and the football has never come in his way again. From that

moment to this moment he has been of no use, that one can see at all.

Still, for that great act we speak of Isaacs gratefully and remember him

kindly; and he forges on, hoping to meet the football somewhere again.

In that vague hope, he had arranged a "movement" for a general

organization of the human family into Debating-Clubs, County Societies,

State Unions, etc., etc., with a view of inducing all children to take

hold of the handles of their knives and forks, instead of the metal.

Children have bad habits in that way. The movement, of course, was

absurd; but we all did our best to forward, not it, but him. It came

time for the annual county-meeting on this subject to be held at

Naguadavick. Isaacs came round, good fellow! to arrange for it,--got the

town-hall, got the Governor to preside (the saint!--he ought to have

triplet doubles provided him by law), and then came to get me to speak.

"No," I said, "I would not speak, if ten Governors presided. I do not

believe in the enterprise. If I spoke, it should be to say children

should take hold of the prongs of the forks and the blades of the

knives. I would subscribe ten dollars, but I would not speak a mill." So

poor Isaacs went his way sadly, to coax Auchmuty to speak, and

Delafield. I went out. Not long after he came back, and told Polly that

they had promised to speak, the Governor would speak, and he himself

would close with the quarterly report, and some interesting anecdotes

regarding Miss Biffin's way of handling her knife and Mr. Nellis's way

of footing his fork. "Now if Mr. Ingham will only come and sit on the

platform, he need not say one word; but it will show well in the

paper,--it will show that the Sandemanians take as much interest in the

movement as the Armenians or the Mesopotamians, and will be a great

favor to me." Polly, good soul! was tempted, and she promised. She knew

Mrs. Isaacs was starving, and the babies,--she knew Dennis was at

home,--and she promised! Night came, and I returned. I heard her story.

I was sorry. I doubted. But Polly had promised to beg me, and I dared

all! I told Dennis to hold his peace, under all circumstances, and sent

him down.

It was not half an hour more before he returned, wild with

excitement,--in a perfect Irish fury,--which it was long before I

understood. But I knew at once that he had undone me!

What happened was this. The audience got together, attracted by Governor

Gorges's name. There were a thousand people. Poor Gorges was late from

Augusta. They became impatient. He came in direct from the train at

last, really ignorant of the object of the meeting. He opened it in the

fewest possible words, and said other gentlemen were present who would

entertain them better than he. The audience were disappointed, but

waited. The Governor, prompted by Isaacs, said, "The Honorable Mr.

Delafield will address you." Delafield had forgotten the knives and

forks, and was playing the Ruy Lopez opening at the chess-club. "The

Rev. Mr. Auchmuty will address you." Auchmuty had promised to speak

late, and was at the school-committee. "I see Dr. Stearns in the hall;

perhaps he will say a word." Dr. Stearns said he had come to listen and

not to speak. The Governor and Isaacs whispered. The Governor looked at

Dennis, who was resplendent on the platform; but Isaacs, to give him his

due, shook his head. But the look was enough. A miserable lad, ill-bred,

who had once been in Boston, thought it would sound well to call for me,

and peeped out, "Ingham!" A few more wretches cried, "Ingham! Ingham!"

Still Isaacs was firm; but the Governor, anxious, indeed, to prevent a

row, knew I would say some thing, and said, "Our friend Mr. Ingham is

always prepared; and, though we had not relied upon him, he will say a

word perhaps." Applause followed, which turned Dennis's head. He rose,

fluttered, and tried No. 3: "There has been so much said, and, on the

whole, so well said, that I will not longer occupy the time!" and sat

down, looking for his hat; for things seemed squally. But the people

cried, "Go on! go on!" and some applauded. Dennis, still confused, but

flattered by the applause, to which neither he nor I are used, rose

again, and this time tried No. 2: "I am very glad you liked it!" in a

sonorous, clear delivery. My best friends stared. All the people who did

not know me personally yelled with delight at the aspect of the evening;

the Governor was beside himself, and poor Isaacs thought he was undone!

Alas, it was I! A boy in the gallery cried in a loud tone, "It's all an

infernal humbug," just as Dennis, waving his hand, commanded silence,

and tried No. 4: "I agree, in general, with my friend the other side of

the room." The poor Governor doubted his senses and crossed to stop

him,--not in time, however The same gallery-boy shouted, "How's your

mother?" and Dennis, now completely lost, tried, as his last shot, No.

1, vainly: "Very well, thank you; and you?"

I think I must have been undone already. But Dennis, like another

Lockhard, chose "to make sicker." The audience rose in a whirl of

amazement, rage, and sorrow. Some other impertinence, aimed at Dennis,

broke all restraint, and, in pure Irish, he delivered himself of an

address to the gallery, inviting any person who wished to fight to come

down and do so,--stating, that they were all dogs and cowards and the

sons of dogs and cowards,--that he would take any five of them

single-handed. "Shure, I have said all his Riverence and the Misthress

bade me say," cried he, in defiance; and, seizing the Governor's cane

from his hand, brandished it, quarter-staff fashion, above his head. He

was, indeed, got from the hall only with the greatest difficulty by the

Governor, the City Marshal, who had been called in, and the

Superintendent of my Sunday-School.

The universal impression, of course, was, that the Rev. Frederic Ingham

had lost all command of himself in some of those haunts of intoxication

which for fifteen years I have been laboring to destroy. Till this

moment, indeed, that is the impression in Naguadavick. This number of

the Atlantic will relieve from it a hundred friends of mine who have

been sadly wounded by that notion now for years; but I shall not be

likely ever to show my head there again.

No! My double has undone me.

We left town at seven the next morning. I came to No. 9, in the Third

Range, and settled on the Minister's Lot. In the new towns in Maine, the

first settled minister has a gift of a hundred acres of land. I am the

first settled minister in No. 9. My wife and little Paulina are my

parish. We raise corn enough to live on in summer. We kill bear's meat

enough to carbonize it in winter. I work on steadily on my "Traces of

Sandemanianism in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries," which I hope to

persuade Phillips, Sampson, & Co. to publish next year. We are very

happy, but the world thinks we are undone.

FOOTNOTE:

[16] Which means, "In the thirteenth century," my dear little

bell-and-coral reader. You have rightly guessed that the question means,

"What is the history of the Reformation in Hungary?"

THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY.

FROM THE INGHAM PAPERS.

[This story was written in the summer of 1863, as a contribution,

however humble, towards the formation of a just and true national

sentiment, or sentiment of love to the nation. It was at the time

when Mr. Vallandigham had been sent across the border. It was my

wish, indeed, that the story might be printed before the autumn

elections of that year,--as my "testimony" regarding the principles

involved in them,--but circumstances delayed its publication till

the December number of the Atlantic appeared.

It is wholly a fiction, "founded on fact." The facts on which it is

founded are these,--that Aaron Burr sailed down the Mississippi

River in 1805, again in 1806, and was tried for treason in 1807.

The rest, with one exception to be noticed, is all fictitious.

It was my intention that the story should have been published with

no author's name, other than that of Captain Frederic Ingham,

U. S. N. Whether writing under his name or my own, I have taken no

liberties with history other than such as every writer of fiction

is privileged to take,--indeed, must take, if fiction is to be

written at all.

The story having been once published, it passed out of my hands.

From that moment it has gradually acquired different accessories,

for which I am not responsible. Thus I have heard it said, that at

one bureau of the Navy Department they say that Nolan was

pardoned, in fact, and returned home to die. At another bureau, I

am told, the answer to questions is, that, though it is true that

an officer was kept abroad all his life, his name was not Nolan. A

venerable friend of mine in Boston, who discredits all tradition,

still recollects this "Nolan court-martial." One of the most

accurate of my younger friends had noticed Nolan's death in the

newspaper, but recollected "that it was in September, and not in

August." A lady in Baltimore writes me, I believe in good faith,

that Nolan has two widowed sisters residing in that neighborhood. A

correspondent of the Philadelphia Despatch believed "the article

untrue, as the United States corvette 'Levant' was lost at sea

nearly three years since, between San Francisco and San Juan." I

may remark that this uncertainty as to the place of her loss rather

adds to the probability of her turning up after three years in Lat.

2° 11' S., Long. 131° W. A writer in the New Orleans Picayune, in a

careful historical paper, explained at length that I had been

mistaken all through; that Philip Nolan never went to sea, but to

Texas; that there he was shot in battle, March 21, 1801, and by

orders from Spain every fifth man of his party was to be shot, had

they not died in prison. Fortunately, however, he left his papers

and maps, which fell into the hands of a friend of the Picayune's

correspondent. This friend proposes to publish them,--and the

public will then have, it is to be hoped, the true history of

Philip Nolan, the man without a country.

With all these continuations, however, I have nothing to do. I can

only repeat that my Philip Nolan is pure fiction. I cannot send his

scrap-book to my friend who asks for it, because I have it not to

send.

I remembered, when I was collecting material for my story, that in

General Wilkinson's galimatias, which he calls his "Memoirs," is

frequent reference to a Jorkins-like partner of his, of the name of

Nolan, who, at some time near the beginning of this century, was

killed in Texas. Whenever Wilkinson found himself in rather a

deeper bog than usual, he used to justify himself by saying that he

could not explain such or such a charge because "the papers

referring to it were lost when _Mr. Nolan_ was imprisoned in

Texas." Finding this mythical character in the mythical legends of

a mythical time, I took the liberty to give him a brother, rather

more mythical, whose adventures should be on the seas. I had the

impression that Wilkinson's friend was named Stephen,--and as such

he is spoken of in this story at page 232. But long after this was

printed, I found that the New Orleans paper was right in saying

that the Texan hero was named Philip. I am very sorry that I

changed him inadvertently to Stephen. It is too late for me to

change him back again. I remember to have heard a distinguished

divine preach on St. Philip's day, by accident, a discourse on the

life of the Evangelist Stephen. If such a mistake can happen in the

best regulated of pulpits, I must be pardoned for mistaking Philip

for Stephen Nolan. The reader must observe that he was dead some

years before the action of this story begins. In the same

connection I must add that Mr. P. Nolan, the teamster in Boston,

whose horse and cart I venture to recommend to an indulgent public,

is no relation of the hero of this tale.

If any reader considers the invention of a brother too great a

liberty to take in fiction, I venture to remind him that "'Tis

sixty years since"; and that I should have the highest authority in

literature even for much greater liberties taken with annals so far

removed from our time.

A Boston paper, in noticing the story of "My Double," contained in

another part of this collection, said it was highly _improbable_. I

have always agreed with that critic. I confess I have the same

opinion of the story of Philip Nolan. It passes on ships which had

no existence, is vouched for by officers who never lived. Its hero

is in two or three places at the same time, under a process wholly

impossible under any conceivable administration of affairs. In

reply, therefore, to a kind adviser in Connecticut, who told me

that the story must be apologized for, because it was doing great

injury to the national cause by asserting such continued cruelty of

the Federal Government through a half-century, I must be permitted

to say that the public, being the Supreme Court of the United

States, "may be supposed to know something."]

I suppose that very few casual readers of the New York Herald of August

13th observed, in an obscure corner, among the "Deaths," the

announcement,--

"NOLAN. Died, on board U. S. Corvette Levant, Lat. 2° 11' S., Long.

131° W., on the 11th of May, PHILIP NOLAN."

I happened to observe it, because I was stranded at the old

Mission-House in Mackinaw, waiting for a Lake Superior steamer which did

not choose to come, and I was devouring to the very stubble all the

current literature I could get hold of, even down to the deaths and

marriages in the Herald. My memory for names and people is good, and the

reader will see, as he goes on, that I had reason enough to remember

Philip Nolan. There are hundreds of readers who would have paused at

that announcement, if the officer of the Levant who reported it had

chosen to make it thus:--"Died, May 11th, THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY."

For it was as "The Man without a Country" that poor Philip Nolan had

generally been known by the officers who had him in charge during some

fifty years, as, indeed, by all the men who sailed under them. I dare

say there is many a man who has taken wine with him once a fortnight, in

a three years' cruise, who never knew that his name was "Nolan," or

whether the poor wretch had any name at all.

There can now be no possible harm in telling this poor creature's story.

Reason enough there has been till now, ever since Madison's

administration went out in 1817, for very strict secrecy, the secrecy of

honor itself, among the gentlemen of the navy who have had Nolan in

successive charge. And certainly it speaks well for the _esprit de

corps_ of the profession, and the personal honor of its members, that to

the press this man's story has been wholly unknown,--and, I think, to

the country at large also. I have reason to think, from some

investigations I made in the Naval Archives when I was attached to the

Bureau of Construction, that every official report relating to him was

burned when Ross burned the public buildings at Washington. One of the

Tuckers, or possibly one of the Watsons, had Nolan in charge at the end

of the war; and when, on returning from his cruise, he reported at

Washington to one of the Crowninshields,--who was in the Navy Department

when he came home,--he found that the Department ignored the whole

business. Whether they really knew nothing about it or whether it was a

"_Non mi ricordo_," determined on as a piece of policy, I do not know.

But this I do know, that since 1817, and possibly before, no naval

officer has mentioned Nolan in his report of a cruise.

But, as I say, there is no need for secrecy any longer. And now the

poor creature is dead, it seems to me worth while to tell a little of

his story, by way of showing young Americans of to-day what it is to be

A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY.

Philip Nolan was as fine a young officer as there was in the "Legion of

the West," as the Western division of our army was then called. When

Aaron Burr made his first dashing expedition down to New Orleans in

1805, at Fort Massac, or somewhere above on the river, he met, as the

Devil would have it, this gay, dashing, bright young fellow, at some

dinner-party, I think. Burr marked him, talked to him, walked with him,

took him a day or two's voyage in his flat-boat, and, in short,

fascinated him. For the next year, barrack-life was very tame to poor

Nolan. He occasionally availed himself of the permission the great man

had given him to write to him. Long, high-worded, stilted letters the

poor boy wrote and rewrote and copied. But never a line did he have in

reply from the gay deceiver. The other boys in the garrison sneered at

him, because he sacrificed in this unrequited affection for a politician

the time which they devoted to Monongahela, hazard, and high-low-jack.

Bourbon, euchre, and poker were still unknown. But one day Nolan had his

revenge. This time Burr came down the river, not as an attorney seeking

a place for his office, but as a disguised conqueror. He had defeated I

know not how many district-attorneys; he had dined at I know not how

many public dinners; he had been heralded in I know not how many Weekly

Arguses, and it was rumored that he had an army behind him and an empire

before him. It was a great day--his arrival--to poor Nolan. Burr had not

been at the fort an hour before he sent for him. That evening he asked

Nolan to take him out in his skiff, to show him a canebrake or a

cotton-wood tree, as he said,--really to seduce him; and by the time the

sail was over, Nolan was enlisted body and soul. From that time, though

he did not yet know it, he lived as A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY.

What Burr meant to do I know no more than you, dear reader. It is none

of our business just now. Only, when the grand catastrophe came, and

Jefferson and the House of Virginia of that day undertook to break on

the wheel all the possible Clarences of the then House of York, by the

great treason-trial at Richmond, some of the lesser fry in that distant

Mississippi Valley, which was farther from us than Puget's Sound is

to-day, introduced the like novelty on their provincial stage, and, to

while away the monotony of the summer at Fort Adams, got up, for

_spectacles_, a string of court-martials on the officers there. One and

another of the colonels and majors were tried, and, to fill out the

list, little Nolan, against whom, Heaven knows, there was evidence

enough,--that he was sick of the service, had been willing to be false

to it, and would have obeyed any order to march any-whither with any

one who would follow him had the order been signed, "By command of His

Exc. A. Burr." The courts dragged on. The big flies escaped,--rightly

for all I know. Nolan was proved guilty enough, as I say; yet you and I

would never have heard of him, reader, but that, when the president of

the court asked him at the close, whether he wished to say anything to

show that he had always been faithful to the United States, he cried

out, in a fit of frenzy,--

"D--n the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States

again!"

I suppose he did not know how the words shocked old Colonel Morgan, who

was holding the court. Half the officers who sat in it had served

through the Revolution, and their lives, not to say their necks, had

been risked for the very idea which he so cavalierly cursed in his

madness. He, on his part, had grown up in the West of those days, in the

midst of "Spanish plot," "Orleans plot," and all the rest. He had been

educated on a plantation where the finest company was a Spanish officer

or a French merchant from Orleans. His education, such as it was, had

been perfected in commercial expeditions to Vera Cruz, and I think he

told me his father once hired an Englishman to be a private tutor for a

winter on the plantation. He had spent half his youth with an older

brother, hunting horses in Texas; and, in a word, to him "United States"

was scarcely a reality. Yet he had been fed by "United States" for all

the years since he had been in the army. He had sworn on his faith as a

Christian to be true to "United States." It was "United States" which

gave him the uniform he wore, and the sword by his side. Nay, my poor

Nolan, it was only because "United States" had picked you out first as

one of her own confidential men of honor that "A. Burr" cared for you a

straw more than for the flat-boat men who sailed his ark for him. I do

not excuse Nolan; I only explain to the reader why he damned his

country, and wished he might never hear her name again.

He never did hear her name but once again. From that moment, September

23, 1807, till the day he died, May 11, 1863, he never heard her name

again. For that half-century and more he was a man without a country.

Old Morgan, as I said, was terribly shocked. If Nolan had compared

George Washington to Benedict Arnold, or had cried, "God save King

George," Morgan would not have felt worse. He called the court into his

private room, and returned in fifteen minutes, with a face like a sheet,

to say,--

"Prisoner, hear the sentence of the Court! The Court decides, subject to

the approval of the President, that you never hear the name of the

United States again."

Nolan laughed. But nobody else laughed. Old Morgan was too solemn, and

the whole room was hushed dead as night for a minute. Even Nolan lost

his swagger in a moment. Then Morgan added,--

"Mr. Marshal, take the prisoner to Orleans in an armed boat, and

deliver him to the naval commander there."

The Marshal gave his orders and the prisoner was taken out of court.

"Mr. Marshal," continued old Morgan, "see that no one mentions the

United States to the prisoner. Mr. Marshal, make my respects to

Lieutenant Mitchell at Orleans, and request him to order that no one

shall mention the United States to the prisoner while he is on board

ship. You will receive your written orders from the officer on duty here

this evening. The court is adjourned without day."

I have always supposed that Colonel Morgan himself took the proceedings

of the court to Washington City, and explained them to Mr. Jefferson.

Certain it is that the President approved them,--certain, that is, if I

may believe the men who say they have seen his signature. Before the

Nautilus got round from New Orleans to the Northern Atlantic coast with

the prisoner on board the sentence had been approved, and he was a man

without a country.

The plan then adopted was substantially the same which was necessarily

followed ever after. Perhaps it was suggested by the necessity of

sending him by water from Fort Adams and Orleans. The Secretary of the

Navy--it must have been the first Crowninshield, though he is a man I do

not remember--was requested to put Nolan on board a government vessel

bound on a long cruise, and to direct that he should be only so far

confined there as to make it certain that he never saw or heard of the

country. We had few long cruises then, and the navy was very much out of

favor; and as almost all of this story is traditional, as I have

explained, I do not know certainly what his first cruise was. But the

commander to whom he was intrusted,--perhaps it was Tingey or Shaw,

though I think it was one of the younger men,--we are all old enough

now,--regulated the etiquette and the precautions of the affair, and

according to his scheme they were carried out, I suppose, till Nolan

died.

When I was second officer of the "Intrepid," some thirty years after, I

saw the original paper of instructions. I have been sorry ever since

that I did not copy the whole of it. It ran, however, much in this

way:--

"WASHINGTON (with a date, which

must have been late in 1807).

"SIR,--You will receive from Lieutenant Neale the person of Philip

Nolan, late a Lieutenant in the United States Army.

"This person on his trial by court-martial expressed with an oath

the wish that he might 'never hear of the United States again.'

"The Court sentenced him to have his wish fulfilled.

"For the present, the execution of the order is intrusted by the

President to this Department.

"You will take the prisoner on board your ship, and keep him there

with such precautions as shall prevent his escape.

"You will provide him with such quarters, rations, and clothing as

would be proper for an officer of his late rank, if he were a

passenger on your vessel on the business of his Government.

"The gentlemen on board will make any arrangements agreeable to

themselves regarding his society. He is to be exposed to no

indignity of any kind, nor is he ever unnecessarily to be reminded

that he is a prisoner.

"But under no circumstances is he ever to hear of his country or to

see any information regarding it; and you will specially caution

all the officers under your command to take care, that, in the

various indulgences which may be granted, this rule, in which his

punishment is involved, shall not be broken.

"It is the intention of the Government that he shall never again

see the country which he has disowned. Before the end of your

cruise you will receive orders which will give effect to this

intention.

"Respectfully yours,

"W. SOUTHARD, for the

Secretary of the Navy."

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 it

were he, handed it to his successor in the charge, and he to his, and I

suppose the commander of the Levant has it to-day as his authority for

keeping this man in this mild custody.

The rule adopted on board the ships on which I have met "the man without

a country" was, I think, transmitted from the beginning. No mess liked

to have him permanently, because his presence cut off all talk of home

or of the prospect of return, of politics or letters, of peace or of

war,--cut off more than half the talk men liked to have at sea. But it

was always thought too hard that he should never meet the rest of us,

except to touch hats, and we finally sank into one system. He was not

permitted to talk with the men, unless an officer was by. With officers

he had unrestrained intercourse, as far as they and he chose. But he

grew shy, though he had favorites: I was one. Then the captain always

asked him to dinner on Monday. Every mess in succession took up the

invitation in its turn. According to the size of the ship, you had him

at your mess more or less often at dinner. His breakfast he ate in his

own state-room,--he always had a state-room,--which was where a sentinel

or somebody on the watch could see the door. And whatever else he ate or

drank, he ate or drank alone. Sometimes, when the marines or sailors had

any special jollification, they were permitted to invite

"Plain-Buttons," as they called him. Then Nolan was sent with some

officer, and the men were forbidden to speak of home while he was

there. I believe the theory was that the sight of his punishment did

them good. They called him "Plain-Buttons," because, while he always

chose to wear a regulation army-uniform, he was not permitted to wear

the army-button, for the reason that it bore either the initials or the

insignia of the country he had disowned.

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 everybody 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 out

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

afterwards 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 windfall. Among them, as the Devil would order, was the "Lay

of the Last 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 thought there could be any risk of anything 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 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 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.

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, about to say,

in true negro state, "'The Old Thirteen,' gentlemen and ladies!" as he

had said "'Virginny Reel,' if you please!" and "'Money-Musk,' if you

please!" the captain's boy tapped him on the shoulder, whispered to him,

and he did not announce the name of the dance; he merely bowed, began on

the air, and they all fell to,--the officers teaching the English girls

the figure, but not telling them why it had no name.

But that is not the story I started to tell.--As the dancing went on,

Nolan and our fellows all got at ease, as I said,--so much so, that it

seemed quite natural for him to bow to that splendid Mrs. Graff, and

say,--

"I hope you have not forgotten me, Miss Rutledge. Shall I have the honor

of dancing?"

He did it so quickly, that Fellows, who was by him, could not hinder

him. She laughed and said,--

"I am not Miss Rutledge any longer, Mr. Nolan; but I will dance all the

same," just nodded to Fellows, as if to say he must leave Mr. Nolan to

her, and led him off to the place where the dance was forming.

Nolan thought he had got his chance. He had known her at Philadelphia,

and at other places had met her, and this was a Godsend. You could not

talk in contra-dances, as you do in cotillons, or even in the pauses of

waltzing; but there were chances for tongues and sounds, as well as for

eyes and blushes. He began with her travels, and Europe, and Vesuvius,

and the French; and then, when they had worked down, and had that long

talking-time at the bottom of the set, he said, boldly,--a little pale,

she said, as she told me the story, years after,--

"And what do you hear from home, Mrs. Graff?"

And that splendid creature looked through him. Jove! how she must have

looked through him!

"Home!! Mr. Nolan!!! I thought you were the man who never wanted to hear

of home again!"--and she walked directly up the deck to her husband, and

left poor Nolan alone, as he always was.--He did not dance again.

I cannot give any history of him in order; nobody can now; and, indeed,

I am not trying to. These are the traditions, which I sort out, as I

believe them, from the myths which have been told about this man for

forty years. The lies that have been told about him are legion. The

fellows used to say he was the "Iron Mask"; and poor George Pons went to

his grave in the belief that this was the author of "Junius," who was

being punished for his celebrated libel on Thomas Jefferson. Pons was

not very strong in the historical line. A happier story than either of

these I have told is of the War. That came along soon after. I have

heard this affair told in three or four ways,--and, indeed, it may have

happened more than once. But which ship it was on I cannot tell.

However, in one, at least, of the great frigate-duels with the English,

in which the navy was really baptized, it happened that a round-shot

from the enemy entered one of our ports square, and took right down the

officer of the gun himself, and almost every man of the gun's crew. Now

you may say what you choose about courage, but that is not a nice thing

to see. But, as the men who were not killed picked themselves up, and as

they and the surgeon's people were carrying off the bodies, there

appeared Nolan, in his shirt-sleeves, with the rammer in his hand, and,

just as if he had been the officer, told them off with authority,--who

should go to the cockpit with the wounded men, who should stay with

him,--perfectly cheery, and with that way which makes men feel sure all

is right and is going to be right. And he finished loading the gun with

his own hands, aimed it, and bade the men fire. And there he stayed,

captain of that gun, keeping those fellows in spirits, till the enemy

struck,--sitting on the carriage while the gun was cooling, though he

was exposed all the time,--showing them easier ways to handle heavy

shot,--making the raw hands laugh at their own blunders,--and when the

gun cooled again, getting it loaded and fired twice as often as any

other gun on the ship. The captain walked forward by way of encouraging

the men, and Nolan touched his hat and said,--

"I am showing them how we do this in the artillery, sir."

And this is the part of the story where all the legends agree; and the

Commodore said,--

"I see you do, and I thank you, sir; and I shall never forget this day,

sir, and you never shall, sir."

And after the whole thing was over, and he had the Englishman's sword,

in the midst of the state and ceremony of the quarter-deck, he said,--

"Where is Mr. Nolan? Ask Mr. Nolan to come here."

And when Nolan came, the captain said,--

"Mr. Nolan, we are all very grateful to you to-day; you are one of us

to-day; you will be named in the despatches."

And then the old man took off his own sword of ceremony, and gave it to

Nolan, and made him put it on. The man told me this who saw it. Nolan

cried like a baby, and well he might. He had not worn a sword since that

infernal day at Fort Adams. But always afterwards on occasions of

ceremony, he wore that quaint old French sword of the Commodore's.

The captain did mention him in the despatches. It was always said he

asked that he might be pardoned. He wrote a special letter to the

Secretary of War. But nothing ever came of it. As I said, that was about

the time when they began to ignore the whole transaction at Washington,

and when Nolan's imprisonment began to carry itself on because there was

nobody to stop it without any new orders from home.

I have heard it said that he was with Porter when he took possession of

the Nukahiwa Islands. Not this Porter, you know, but old Porter, his

father, Essex Porter,--that is, the old Essex Porter, not this Essex. As

an artillery officer, who had seen service in the West, Nolan knew more

about fortifications, embrasures, ravelins, stockades, and all that,

than any of them did; and he worked with a right good-will in fixing

that battery all right. I have always thought it was a pity Porter did

not leave him in command there with Gamble. That would have settled all

the question about his punishment. We should have kept the islands, and

at this moment we should have one station in the Pacific Ocean. Our

French friends, too, when they wanted this little watering-place, would

have found it was preoccupied. But Madison and the Virginians, of

course, flung all that away.

All that was near fifty years ago. If Nolan was thirty then, he must

have been near eighty when he died. He looked sixty when he was forty.

But he never seemed to me to change a hair afterwards. As I imagine his

life, from what I have seen and heard of it, he must have been in every

sea, and yet almost never on land. He must have known, in a formal way,

more officers in our service than any man living knows. He told me once,

with a grave smile, that no man in the world lived so methodical a life

as he. "You know the boys say I am the Iron Mask, and you know how busy

he was." He said it did not do for any one to try to read all the 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 Linnæus 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

Mars or the Book of Deuteronomy, I should not have asked why; there were

a great many things which seemed to me to have as little reason. I first

came to understand anything about "the man without a country" one day

when we overhauled a dirty little schooner which had slaves on board.

An officer was sent to take charge of her, and, after a few minutes, he

sent back his boat to ask that some one might be sent him who could

speak Portuguese. We were all looking over the rail when the message

came, and we all wished we could interpret, when the captain asked Who

spoke Portuguese. But none of the officers did; and just as the captain

was sending forward to ask if any of the people could, Nolan stepped out

and said he should be glad to interpret, if the captain wished, as he

understood the language. The captain thanked him, fitted out another

boat with him, and in this boat it was my luck to go.