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 year 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