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,--

"Damn 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,
[Note 6] 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