always agreed with that critic. I confess I have the same opinion of
this 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. When my friend, Mr. W.H. Reed,
sent me from City Point, in Virginia, the record of the death of PHILIP
NOLAN, a negro from Louisiana, who died in the cause of his country in
service in a colored regiment, I felt that he had done something to
atone for the imagined guilt of the imagined namesake of his unfortunate
god-father.

E.E.H.

ROXBURY, MASS., March 20, 1886.

* * * * *

I supposed that very few casual readers of the New York Herald of August
18th 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