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," [Note 7] 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