 THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY by Edward Everett Hale. THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY by Edward Everett Hale. I suppose that very few casual readers of the New York Herald of August 18 observed, in an obscure corner, among the deaths. The announcement. Nolan died on board U.S. Corvette Levant, latitude two degrees eleven minutes south, longitude one hundred and thirty-one degrees west, on the eleventh of May, Philip Nolan. I happened to observe it, because I was stranded at the old mission house in Mackinac, 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 a 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 eleventh, the man without a country. For it was as, the man without a country, that poor Philip Nolan had been generally known, by the officers who had had him in charge, during some fifty years, as, indeed, by all the men who had 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 eighteen-seventeen, 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 have 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, upon returning from his cruise, he reported at Washington to one of the Crown and Shields, 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 non-me-recordo 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 worthwhile to tell a little of his story, by way of showing young Americans of today what it is to be a man without a country. Bob 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 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 a day or two's voyage on his flat boat, and, in short, fascinated him. For the next year, Barrick Life was very tame for 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 that they devoted to the Monongahela, Hazard and High Low Jack. Burrben, Euker, 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 distinguished conqueror. He had defeated, I know not how many district attorneys. He had dined that, 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 cane-break or a cottonwood tree, as he said, really to seduce him. And by the time the sale 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 clearances of the then House of New York by the great treason trial at Richmond, some of the lesser fry in that distant Mississippi valley, which is farther from us than Puget 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 marshals on the officers there. One and another of the kernels and majors was 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 wither, with any one who would follow him, had the order been signed, by a command of his Excellency A. Burr. The courts dragged on. The big flies escaped, rightly for all I know. Nolan was proved guilty, 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 Colonel Morgan, who was holding the Court. Half of the officers who sat in it had served through the Revolution, and their lives, not to say their necks, had been risk for the very idea he so cavalierly cursed in his madness. He, on his part, had grown up in the West of those days, in the midst of the 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 spent half his youth with an older brother hunting horses in Texas, and 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 flatboat 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 15 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 United States again. Nolan laughed, but nobody else laughed. Old Morgan was too solemn and the whole room was hushed deadest night for a minute. Even Nolan lost his swagger in a moment. Then Morgan added, Mr. Marshall, take the prisoner to Orlean's in an armed boat and deliver him to the naval commander there. The Marshall gave his orders and the prisoner was taken out of the court. Mr. Marshall, continued Old Morgan, see that no one mentions the United States to the prisoner. Mr. Marshall, make my respects to Lieutenant Mitchell at Orlean's 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 Orlean's to the North 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 as was necessarily followed ever after. Perhaps it was suggested by the necessity of sending him by water from Fort Adams to Orlean's. The Secretary of the Navy, it must have been the first crown and shield, though he is a man I do not remember, was requested to put Nolan on board a 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 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 entrusted, perhaps it was Tingy 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 have been late in 1807. Sir, you will receive from Lieutenant Neal the person of Philip Nolan, late Lieutenant of 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 has sentenced him to have his wish fulfilled. For the present the execution of this order is entrusted by the president of 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 ship 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 to unnecessarily be reminded that he is a prisoner. But under no circumstances is he ever to hear of his country, or 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. Surely 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 today 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 like to have impermanently, because his presence cut off all talk of home, or of the prospect of return, of politics or letters, of peace or war, cut off more than half the talk men like 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 to 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 his favorites, I was one. Then the Captain always asked him to dinner on Monday. Every mess in succession took up 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 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 that the sight of his punishment did them good. They called him plain buttons, because, while he 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 called them dons, but the phrase was long since changed, fell into talking about Nolan, and someone 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 best hung heavy, and every one 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 newspapers 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 for 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 a part of that 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 was the only time I knew of that voyage. They had touched at the Cape, and 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 did 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 a 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 of 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 Nair 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 concentrated all in self. And here the poor fellow choked, could not go on, but started up, bringing the book into the sea, vanished into his stateroom. 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, but all that, but Phillips said that after he came out of his stateroom, he was never 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 the Flecher'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 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 that 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 of our best vessels, but which kept him all his life at least some one 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 stateroom 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 to 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 have never heard of a man-of-war ball that was not. For ladies they had the family of the American consul, one or two travelers who had adventured so far, and a nice bevy of English girls and matrons, perhaps even 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 contra-tempts. 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 a 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 his fiddles to begin and bent forward, about to say in true Negro state, the Old Thirteen ladies and gentlemen, as he had said, Virginia 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 too. 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 with 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 leave Mr. Nolan to her, and let 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 coutillions, or even in the pauses of waltzing, but there were chances for tongues and sounds as well as 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 I 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 Ponds 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. Ponds 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 our 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 in 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 a 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, that 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 the gun, keeping those fellows and 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 swore, 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 Mr. Nolan came, the captain said, Mr. Nolan, we are very grateful to you today. You are one of us today, and you will be named in the dispatches. 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 Commodores. The captain did mention him in the dispatches. It was said that 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 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 Nukahawa 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, umbershurs, 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. It would have settled all the questions 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 it all 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 have changed 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 lives 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 anyone to try and read all the time, more than do anything else all the time, but that he read just five hours a day. Then he said, I keep up my notebooks, writing in them at such and such hours from what I have been reading. And I include in these my scrapbooks. These were very curious indeed. He had six or eight of different subjects. There was one of history, one of natural science, one of 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 them in 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 I had ever seen in my life. I wonder who will have Nolan's scrapbooks. Well, he said his reading and his notes were his profession, and they took five hours and two hours respectively each day. Then he said, every man should have a diversion as well as 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 cinapedes and cockroaches and such small game. He was the only naturalist I ever met who knew anything about the habits of the housefly and the mosquito. All those people can tell you whether they are Lepidoptera or Stepadoptera, but as for telling you how to get rid of them, or how they get away from you when you strike, why Lincius 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. Until 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 amid shipment. 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. When the time I joined, I believe I thought Nolan was a sort of a 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 his boat back to ask that someone might be sent to him, who could speak Portuguese. We were all looking over the rail when that message came, and we all wished that 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, no one stepped out and said that he should be glad to interpret if the captain wished, as he spoke the language. The captain thanked him, fitted out another boat with him, and in this boat it was my luck to go. When we got there, it was such a scene as you seldom see, you never want to, nastiness beyond account, and chaos ran loose in the midst of the nastiness. There were not a great many of the negroes, but by way of making what there were understand that they were free, Vaughn had had their handcuffs and ankle-cuffs knocked off, and, for convenience sake, was putting them upon the rascals of the schooner's crew. The negroes were, for the most part, out of the hold, and swarming around the dirty deck with the central throng surrounding Vaughn, and addressing him in every dialect and patois of a dialect from the Zulu clique up to the Parisian of Beladelgerade. As we came on deck, Vaughn looked down from the hog's head, on which he was mounted in desperation, and said, For God's love, is there anybody who can make these wretches understand something? The men gave them rum, and that did not quiet them, I knocked that big fellow down twice, and that did not soothe him, and then I chocked all to all of them together, and I'll be hanged if they understood that as well as they understood the English. Nolan said he could speak Portuguese, and one or two of the fine-looking crewmen were dragged out, who, it had been found already, had worked for the Portuguese on the coast at Fernando Poe. Tell them they are free, said Vaughn, and tell them that these rascals are to be hanged as soon as we can get rope enough. Nolan put that into Spanish, that is, he explained it in such Portuguese as the crewmen could understand, and they, in turn, to such of those Negroes who could understand them. Then there was such a yell of delight, clenching of fists, leaping and dancing, kissing of Nolan's feet, and a general rush made to the hog's head by way of spontaneous worship of Vaughn, as the dulce ex machina of the occasion. Tell them Vaughn said, well pleased, that I will take them to Cape Palmas. This did not answer so well. Cape Palmas was practically as far from the homes of most of them as New Orleans or Rio de Janeiro was, that is, they would be eternally separated from their home there, and their interpreters, as we could understand, instantly said, ah, non-Palmas, and began to propose infinite other expeditions in most valuable language. Vaughn was rather disappointed at this result of his liberality, and asked Nolan eagerly what they said. The drops stood on poor Nolan's white forehead, as he hushed the men down and said, he says, not Palmas, he says, take us home, take us to our own country, take us to our own house, take us to our own Picaninis, and our own women. He says he has an old father and mother, who will die if they do not see him. And this one says, he left his people all sick, and paddled down to Fernando to beg the white doctor to come and help them. And that these devils caught him in the bay just inside of home, and that he has never seen any one from home since then. And this one says, choked out Nolan, that he has not heard a word from his home in six months, while he has been locked up in an infernal barracoon. Vaughn always said he grew gray himself while Nolan struggled through this interpretation. I, who did not understand anything of the passion involved in it, saw that the very elements were melting with fervent heat, and that something was to pay somewhere. Even the Negroes themselves stopped howling as they saw Nolan's agony, and Vaughn's almost equal agony of sympathy. As quick as he could get words, he said, tell them, yes, yes, yes, tell them they shall go to the mountains of the moon if they will. If I sail the schooner through the great white desert, they shall go home. And after some fashion Nolan said so, and then they all fell to kissing him again, and wanted to rub his nose with theirs. But he could not stand it long, and getting Vaughn to say that he might go back, he beckoned me down into our boat. As we lay back in the stern sheets, and the men gave way, he said to me, youngster, let that show you what it is to be without a family, without a home, and without a country. And if you are ever tempted to say a word or do a thing that shall put a bar between you and your family, your home, and your country, pray God in his mercy to take you that instant home to his own heaven. Stick by your family, boy, forget you have a self while you do everything for them. Think of your home, boy, write and sin and talk about it. Let it be nearer and nearer to your thought the further you travel from it, and rush back to it when you are free as that poor black slave is doing now. And for your country, boy, and the words rattled in his throat, and for that flag, and he pointed to the ship, never dream a dream but of serving her as she bids you, though the service carry you through a thousand hells. No matter what happens to you, no matter who flatters you or who abuses you, never look at another flag, never let a night pass but you pray God to bless that flag. Remember, boy, that behind all these men you have to do with, behind officers and government and people even, there is the country herself, your country, and that you belong to her as you belong to your own mother. Stand by her, boy, as you would stand by your mother if those devils there got hold of her today. I was frightened to death by his calm, hard passion, but I blundered out that I would by all that was holy and that I had never thought of doing anything else. He hardly seemed to hear me, but he did, almost in a whisper say, Oh, if anybody had said so to me when I was of your age. I think it was this half-confidence of his which I never abused, for I never told this story till now, which afterward made us great friends. He was very kind to me. Often he sat up, or even got up, at night, to walk the deck with me when it was my watch. He explained to me a great deal of my mathematics, and I owe to him my taste for mathematics. He lent me books and helped me about my reading. He never alluded so directly to his story again, but from one and another officer I have learned in thirty years what I am telling. When we parted from him in St. Thomas Harbour at the end of our cruise I was more sorry than I can tell. I was very glad to meet him again in 1830, and in later life when I thought I had some influence in Washington I moved heaven and earth to have him discharged, but it was like getting a ghost out of prison. They pretended that there was no such man, and never was such a man. They will say so at the department now. Perhaps they do not know. It will not be the first thing in the service of which the department appears to know nothing. There is a story that Nolan met Burr once on one of our vessels when a party of Americans came on board in the Mediterranean. But this I believe to be a lie, or rather it is a myth, when Trevato, involving a tremendous blowing up with which he sank Burr, asking him how he liked to be without a country, but it is clear from Burr's life that nothing of the sort could have happened. And I mention this only as an illustration of the stories that get a going where there is the least mystery at bottom. So poor Philip Nolan had his wish fulfilled. I know but one fate more dreadful. It is the fate reserved for those men who shall have one day to exile themselves from their country because they have attempted her ruin, and shall have at the same time to see the prosperity and honor to which she rises when she has rid herself of them and their inequities. The wish of poor Nolan, as we learn to call him, not because his punishment was too great, but because his repentance was so clear, was precisely the wish of every bragg and bow-regard who broke a soldier's oath two years ago, and every morey and baron who broke a sailor's. I do not know how often they have repented. I do know that they have done all that in them lay, that they might have no country, that all the honors, associations, memories, and hopes which belong to country might be broken up into little shreds and distributed to the winds. I know, too, that their punishment, as they vegetate through the rest of what is left of life to them in wretched boulans and lychester squares, where they are destined to upgrade each other till they die, will have all the agony of Nolan's, with the added pang that every one who sees them will see them to despise and to execrate them. They will have their wish like him. For him, poor fellow, he repented his folly, and then, like a man, submitted to the fate he had asked for. He never intentionally added to the difficulty or delicacy of the charge of those who had him in hold. Accidents would happen, but they never happened from his fault. Lieutenant Truxton told me that when Texas was annexed there was a careful discussion among the officers whether they should get hold of Nolan's handsome set of maps and cut Texas out of it from the map of the world and the map of Mexico. The United States had been cut out when the Atlas was bought for him, but it was voted, rightly enough, that to do this would be virtually to reveal to him what had happened or, as Harry Cole said, to make him think Old Burr had succeeded. So it was from no fault of Nolan's that a great botch happened at my own table when, for a short time, I was in command of the George Washington Corvette on the South American station. We were lying in the La Plata, and some of the officers who had been on shore and had just joined again were entertaining us with accounts of their misadventures in riding the half-wild horses of Buenos Aires. Nolan was at table and was in an unusually bright and talkative mood. Some story of a tumble reminded him of an adventure of his own when he was catching wild horses in Texas with his adventurous cousin at a time when he must have been quite a boy. He told the story with a good deal of spirit, so much so that the silence, which often follows a good story, hung over the table for an instant, to be broken by Nolan himself, for he asked perfectly unconsciously, Pray, what has become of Texas? After the Mexicans got their independence, I thought that the province of Texas would come forward very fast. It is really one of the finest regions on earth. It is the Italy of this continent, but I have not seen or heard a word of Texas for near twenty years. There were two Texan officers at the table. The reason he had never heard of Texas was that Texas and her affairs had been painfully cut out of the newspapers since Austin began his settlements, so that while he read of Honduras and Tomolapus, until quite lately of California, this virgin province in which his brother had traveled so far and, I believe, had died, had ceased to be to him. Waters and Williams, the two Texas men, looked grimly at each other, and tried not to laugh. Edward Morris had his attention attracted by the third link in the chain of the Captain Chandelier. Watris was seized by a convulsion of sneezing. Nolan himself saw that something was to pay. He did not know what. And I, as master of the feast, had to say, Texas is out of the map, Mr. Nolan. Have you seen Captain Bax's curious account of Sir Thomas Rose Welcome? After that cruise I never saw Nolan again. I wrote to him at least twice a year, for in that voyage we became even confidentially intimate, but he never wrote to me. The other men tell me that in those fifteen years he aged very fast, as well he might indeed, but that he was still the same gentle, uncomplaining, silent sufferer that he ever was, bearing as best he could his self-appointed punishment. Rather less social, perhaps, with new men whom he did not know, but more anxious, apparently, than ever to serve and befriend and teach the boys, some of whom fairly seemed to worship him. And now it seems the dear old fellow is dead. He has found a home, at last, and a country. Since writing this, and while considering whether or not I would print it as a warning to young Nolan's and Vlandingham's and Tatnall's of today, of what it is to throw away a country, I have received from Danforth, who is on board the Leavitt, a letter which gives an account of Nolan's last hours. To understand the first words of the letter, the non-professional reader should remember that after 1817 the position of every officer who had Nolan in charge was one of the greatest delicacy. The government had failed to renew the order of 1807 regarding him. What was a man to do? Should he let him go? What then, if he were called to account by the department for violating the order of 1807? Should he keep him? What then, if Nolan should be liberated some day, and should bring an action for false imprisonment or kidnapping against every man who had had him in charge? I urged and pressed this upon Southard, and I have reason to think that other officers did the same thing. But the secretary always said, as they so often do at Washington, that there were no special orders to give, that we must act on our own judgment. That means, if you succeed you will be sustained. If you fail you will be disavowed. Well, as Danforth says, all that is over now, though I do not know but I expose myself to a criminal prosecution on the evidence of the very revelation I am making. Here is the letter. Levant, two degrees two minutes south at one hundred and thirty-one degrees west. Dear Fred, I try to find heart and life to tell you that it is all over with dear old Nolan. I have been with him on this voyage more than I ever was, and I can understand wholly now the way in which you used to speak of the dear old fellow. I could see that he was not strong, but I had no idea the end was so near. The doctor has been watching him very carefully, and yesterday morning came to me and told me that Nolan was not so well, and had not left his stateroom, a thing I never remember before. He had let the doctor come and see him as he lay there, the first time the doctor had been in the stateroom, and he said he should like to see me. Oh, dear, do you remember the mysteries we boys used to invent about his room in the old intrepid days? Well, I went in. And there, to be sure, the poor fellow lay in his birth, smiling pleasantly as he gave me his hand, but looking very frail. I could not help a glance around, which showed me a little shrine he had made of the box he was lying in. The stars and stripes were triced up above and around a picture of Washington, and he had painted a majestic eagle with lightnings blazing from his beak, and his foot just clasping the whole globe, which his wings overshadowed. The dear boy saw my glance and said with a sad smile, Here, you see, I have a country. And then he pointed to the foot of his bed, where I had not seen before a great map of the United States, as he had drawn it from memory, and which he had there to look upon as he lay. Quaint, queer old names were on it, in large letters, Indian Territory, Mississippi Territory, Louisiana Territory, as I suppose our fathers learned such things. But the old fellow had patched in Texas, too, and had carried his western boundary all the way to the Pacific, but on that shore he defined nothing. Oh, Danforth, he said, I know I am dying. I cannot get home. Surely you will tell me something now. Stop, stop, do not speak till I say what I am sure you know, that there is not in this ship, that there is not in America, God bless her, a more loyal man than I. There cannot be a man who loves the old flag as I do, or prays for it as I do, or hopes for it as I do. There are 34 stars in it now, Danforth. I thank God for that, though I do not know what their names are. There has never been one taken away. I thank God for that. I know by that that there has never been a successful burr. Oh, Danforth, Danforth, he sighed out, how like a wretched night's dream, a boy's idea of personal fame, or a separate sovereignty seems when one looks back on it after a life such as mine, but tell me, tell me something, tell me everything, Danforth, before I die. Ingham, I swear to you that I felt like a monster, that I had not told him everything before. Danger or no danger, delicacy or no delicacy, who was I that I should have been acting the tyrant all this time over this dear, sainted old man, who had years ago expiated in his whole manhood's life the madness of a boy's treason. Mr. Nolan, I said, I will tell you everything you ask about, only where shall I begin? Oh, the blessed smile that crept over his white face, and he pressed my hand and said, God bless you. Tell me their names, he said. He pointed to the stars on the flag. The last I know is Ohio. My father lived in Kentucky, but I have guessed Michigan and Indiana and Mississippi. That was where Fort Adams is. They make twenty. But where are your other fourteen? You have not cut up any of the old ones, I hope? Well that was not a bad text, and I told him the names in as good order as I could, and he bad me take down his beautiful map and draw them in as best I could with my pencil. He was wild with delight about Texas. He told me how his cousin died there. He had marked a gold cross near where he supposed his grave was, and he had guessed it, Texas. Then he was delighted as he saw California and Oregon. That, he said, he had suspected partly, because he had never been permitted to land on that shore, though the ships were there so much. And the men, he said, brought off a good deal besides furs. Then he went back, heaven knows how far, to ask about the Chesapeake. And what was done to Barron for surrendering her to the Leopard, and whether Burr ever tried again? And he ground his teeth with the only passion he showed. But in a moment that was over, and he said, God forgive me, for I am sure I forgive him. Then he asked about the old war, told me the true story of his serving the gun the day we took the Java. Ask about dear old David Porter as he called him. Then settled down, more quietly and very happily, to hear me tell, in an hour, the history of fifty years. How I wished it had been somebody who knew something. But I did as well as I could. I told him of the English war. I told him about Fulton and the steamboat beginning. I told him about Old Scott and Jackson. Told him all I could think of about the Mississippi and New Orleans and Texas and his old Kentucky. And do you think he asked who was in command of the Legion of the West? I told him it was a very gallant officer named Grant, and that, by our last news, he was about to establish headquarters at Vicksburg. Then where was Vicksburg? I worked it out on the map. It was about a hundred miles more or less above his old Fort Adams. And I thought Fort Adams must be a ruin now. It must be an old Vicks plantation at Walnut Hills, he said. Well, that is a change. I tell you, Ingham, it was a hard thing to condense the history of a half-century into that talk with a sick man. And I do not now know what I told him of immigration and the means of it, of steamboats and railroads and telegraphs, of inventions and books and literature, of the colleges and West Point and the Naval School. But with the queerest interpretations that ever you heard, you see, it was Robinson Caruso asking all the accumulated questions of fifty-six years. I remember he asked all of a sudden, who was President now? And when I told him, he asked if old Abe was General Benjamin Lincoln's son. He said he had met old General Lincoln when he was quite a boy himself at some Indian territory. I said no, that old Abe was a Kentuckian like himself, but I could not tell him of what family. He had worked up from the ranks. Good for him! cried Nolan. I am glad of that. As I have brooded and wondered, I have thought our danger was in keeping up those regular successions in the first families. Then I got talking about my visit to Washington. I told him of meeting the Oregon Congressman Harding. I told him about the Smithsonian and the exploring expedition. I told him about the capital and the statues for the pediment. And Crawford's Library and Greenhouse, Washington. I told him everything I could think of that would show the grandeur of his country and its prosperity. But I could not make my mouth tell him a word about this infernal rebellion. And he drank it in and enjoyed it as I cannot tell you. He grew more and more silent, yet I never thought he was tired or faint. I gave him a glass of water, but he just wet his lips and told me not to go away. Then he asked me to bring the Presbyterian Book of Public Prayer, which lay there, and said, with a smile, that it would open at the right place, and so it did. There was a double red mark down the page, and I knelt down and read, and he repeated with me, for ourselves and our country, O gracious God we thank thee, that, notwithstanding our manyfold transgressions of thy holy laws, thou hast continued to us thy marvelous kindness. And so to the end of that thanksgiving. Then he turned to the end of the same book, and I read the words more familiar to me. Most hardly we beseech thee, with thy favor to behold, and bless thy servant, the President of the United States, and all others in authority, and the rest of the Episcopal Collect. Danforth, he said, I have repeated those prayers night and morning. It is now fifty-five years. And then he said he would go to sleep. He bent me down over him and kissed me, and said, Look in my Bible, Danforth, when I am gone, and I went away. But I had no thought it was the end. I thought he was tired and would sleep. I knew he was happy, and I wanted him to be alone. But in an hour, when the doctor went in gently, he found Nolan had breathed his life away with a smile. He had something pressed close to his lips. It was his father's badge of the order of the Cincinnati. He looked in his Bible, and there was a slip of paper at the place where he had marked the text. They desire a country, even a heavenly, wherefore God is not a shame to be called their God, for he hath prepared for them a city. On the slip of paper he had written, Bury me in the sea. It has been my home, and I love it. But will not someone set up a stone for my memory at Fort Adams, or at Orleans, that my disgrace may not be more than I ought to bear? Say on it. In memory of Philip Nolan, lieutenant in the Army of the United States, he loved his country as no other man has loved her, but no man deserved less at her hands. End of The Man Without a Country by Edward Everett Hale This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Rowdy Delaney, Idaho, USA, September 2007. The New Son by J. S. Fletcher. From the time he had taken up the study of astronomy as a pleasant means of spending his newly acquired leisure, and had built himself a small, well-equipped observatory as an adjunct to his house which stood on one of the highest slopes of Leith Hill, McQuillan had formed the habit of rising from his bed every two or three hours of a cloudy night to see if the sky had cleared. To some men such a habit would have been highly inconvenient, for many obvious reasons, but McQuillan was in a lucky position. He was unmarried. He possessed much more than ample means. He had, therefore, no business or profession to attend to, and, accordingly, no train to catch in the morning to keep office hours. He could sleep at any time of the day he chose, and if he jumped out of bed at two o'clock in the morning to find the sky was still cloudy he could jump back and go to sleep again on the instant. And he was, moreover, an enthusiast of the first order. On a certain night in February of 1920 McQuillan, who had gone to bed at ten o'clock, suddenly awoke, switched on the electric light at the side of his bed, and, seeing that it was ten minutes past twelve, sprang out, shuffled himself into a thickly padded dressing-gown, and hurried up the winding stairs which led to the observatory. One glance into the night showed him a perfectly clear sky. From the vast dome of heaven wondrously blue the stars shone out like points of fire, and McQuillan, with a sigh of satisfaction, began his work at the telescope, comparing the sky field by field with his star chart on the chance of finding new variable stars. After his usual fashion he was immediately absorbed, and the sky remaining clear he went on working, unconscious of the time, until a deep-toned clock in the room beneath struck the hour of three. Then McQuillan started, and realized that he had been so absorbed that he had not noticed the striking of one or two, and leaned back from the telescope in a suddenly assumed attitude of relaxation, stretching his arms and casting his eyes to the still clear vault above him. The next instant he became rigid. The next he began to tremble with excitement. The next he could have shouted for joy, for there, in the constellation which astronomers have named Andromeda, McQuillan detected a new star. He knew as he gazed and gazed, intoxicated with the delight and wonder of his discovery, that the burning and glittering object at which he was looking had never shown its light to man before. There was no need to turn to his star charts. McQuillan, being a rich man, was always equipped with the latest information from the greatest observatories in the world. That star, burning with such magnificence, was on no chart. Nay, he himself had taken a photograph of that particular field in the heavens only twenty-four hours previously, wherein were stars to the twelfth magnitude, but the star at which he gazed was not amongst them. McQuillan had suddenly blazed up, and as he watched he saw it visibly, plainly, increase in brightness and magnitude. A new star, he murmured mechanically, a new star. I wonder who else has seen it. McQuillan continued to watch until, as the February dawn drew near, the clouds spread great curtains between him and the heavens, and the sky and the stars were blotted out. Then he went to his bed, and, in spite of his excitement, he slept soundly until ten o'clock in the morning. When McQuillan woke, and looked out across the surrey hills and veils, the entire landscape was being rapidly blotted out by a curious mist, or fog, which seemed to come from nowhere. A vast, mighty blanket of yellow seemed to drop between him and everything as he looked. At one moment he saw the summit of a hill many miles away. The next he could not even see his own garden beneath his windows. And when he went downstairs, half an hour later, the fog had become of the color of gray ash, and the house was full of it, and the electric light was turned on everywhere, and to little effect. McQuillan's sister Adela, who kept house for him, with the assistance of a housekeeper and several female servants, came to him in his study, looking scared. Dan, she said, isn't there something queer about this fog? It's getting worse. McQuillan laid down a bundle of letters which he had just taken up, and walked out to the front door and into the garden. He looked around him, and he sniffed. Hmm, it certainly does seem queer, Addy, he said. We've certainly never seen a fog like this in these parts since we knew them. The girl sniffed, too. Dan, she said, it's like as if it were the very finest dust. And look there. She had been wiping her hand with a tiny wisp of a handkerchief as she spoke, and now she held the handkerchief out to McQuillan. Look, she repeated. McQuillan looked down, and saw a curious stain, a species of smudge or smear of a faint gray color. Without making any remark, he ran the tip of his finger over the nearest object, an espilir. The same smudge or smear appeared on his finger. It's on everything, whispered the girl. See, it's on my cheek. It's some sort of dust, Dan. What's the matter? But McQuillan made no answer. He asked for breakfasts, and they went in together. By that time the interior of the house was as full of the fog as the exterior was hidden by it, and everything that they touched, plate, china, linen, gave off the gray smear, and by noon everything was wrapped in an ashen gray atmosphere, and the electrical lights had no power beyond a very limited compass. This is vexatious, said McQuillan. I was going to have the motor out and take you across to Greenwich. I wanted to make an inquiry at the observatory. Do you know, Addy, I found a new star last night. A new star, she said, wonderingly. But you won't go, Dan. Won't go, he said, laughing. I should like to see anybody go anywhere in this, though it may be only local. By George, weren't the cockerlings coming out to dine and sleep to-night? Addy nodded. Well, I hope they won't run into this, continued McQuillan. Ah, I'll ring Dick Cockerling up, and ask him what the weather's like in town. And then I'll ring up the observatory. He went off to the small room in which the telephone was placed. His sister followed him, and as they passed beneath the cluster of lights in the hall, McQuillan saw the girl's face was drawn and pallid. He stopped sharply. Why, Addy, he said, frightened? She laid her hand on his arm, and he felt it trembling. Dan, she whispered, I'm horribly frightened. What is this? You know, there's never been anything like this before, in our time. What's happened? McQuillan laughed, and padded the hand that lay on his arm. Come, come, Addy, he said soothingly. This isn't like you. I think this fog is uncommon, and I can't account for it. But I've no doubt it can be accounted for. Now let me ring up Cockerling. I have a notion. We shall hear they've got a bright morning there in London. The girl shook her head, made as if she would follow him to the telephone, and then suddenly turned away. In the silence a woman's scream rang out. That's Cook, in hysterics, said Addy. I shall have to be brave for the sake of the servant, Dan. They're all as frightened as I am. Nearly an hour later McQuillan came out of the little room, and he called his sister into the study. He closed the door and beckoned her into the arc of the electric light. This is queer, he said in a whisper. I've been talking to Cockerling, and to the observatory. Dick says this fog struck London at ten o'clock. It's just as it is here, and everything's at a stand still. Dick hasn't the remotest notion how he's going to get away from the city. But that's nothing. Addy, it's all over Europe. The girl made a little inarticulate sound of horror in her throat, and her face whitened. All over Europe, so they say at Greenwich, continued McQuillan. From Lisbon to Moscow, and from Ivernis to Constantinople. And in sea. It's everywhere. It—well, it's something unexplainable. Such a thing has never been known before. But it's no use getting frightened, Addy. You must be brave. It's no doubt some natural phenomenon that we'll be accounted for. And, phew, how very hot this room is! The girl went close to her brother, and laid her hand on his arm. Dan, she said, it isn't the room. See? The fire's very low, and the ventilating fan's working. It's the same everywhere. Come into the garden. McQuillan followed her out of the house, knitting his brows, and snapping his fingers after his want when he was puzzled. For several days the weather had been unusually cold for the time of year. Released now from the preoccupation of the last few hours, he suddenly realized that the day was as hot as a July day should be under normal conditions. He turned to the outdoor thermometer. Why, why, he exclaimed, it's over seventy now, seventy in February? Addy, something's happened to this old world of ours, that's certain. Look there! As they watched, the mercury rose, one, two, three figures. The brother and sister stared at each other, and McQuillan suddenly dropped his hand with a gesture of helplessness. Well, he said, there's nothing to be done but to wait. I—I don't understand it. They went back into the house together, and into McQuillan's study, only to stand and stare at each other in silence. Then Addy made a sudden effort at conversation. Tell me about the new star, Dan, she said. McQuillan started. The new star, he exclaimed. The new star! My God! I wonder if that has anything to do with this. If—the parlor made, white and scared, came noiselessly into the circle of light, within which the brother and sister were standing. You are wanted on the telephone, sir, she said. McQuillan went off. In a few minutes he came back, shaking his head. That was the observatory, he said quietly. This fog, or whatever it is, is all over the world—over South Africa, North and South America, India, Australia, anyway, and the heats increasing. And—the reason? whispered Addy. McQuillan sat down, and dropped his head in his hands. There's no man can tell the reason, he answered. He can't even make a guess at it. Something's happened. That's all. We have to—wait. Wait! And he took up the letters, which remained unopened on his desk, and began to sort them out and to read them. Let's go on with our ordinary routine, he said. That will be best. The girl left the room, jangling a bunch of keys. But within half an hour she was back, accompanied by the housekeeper. Dan, she said quietly. The servants want to go. They think the end of the world's come, and they want to get to their homes. How did they propose to reach them, asked McQuillan? They can't see a yard before them. I told them that, Mr. McQuillan, said the housekeeper, but it was of no use. You see, sir, they all live pretty close to here, and they say they can find their way blindfolded. They better go, sir, or we shall have more hysterics. Give me some money for them, Dan, said Addy. McQuillan rose, and, unlocking a drawer, handed a cash box to his sister. I don't see what good money will do them if the world's coming to an end, he said, with a laugh. Well, let them do what they like. When the two women had left him, McQuillan went outside again, and looked at the thermometer hanging on the wall. My God, he said, Addy, already! What can it mean? And then, standing there in the strange, all-wrapping fog in his quiet garden on the slope of the peaceful Surrey Hills, McQuillan's thoughts turned to the great city, lying only a few miles away. What was happening in London? He saw, with a small exercise of imagination, the congested traffic, the discomfort, the inconvenience, the upsetting of all arrangement and order in an ordinary fog. What, then, must be the effect of this extraordinary one? For McQuillan was sufficiently versed in science, to know that the world had never, never at any rate since historical records of it had begun, known such a day as this, and supposing it lasted, supposing—and then he interrupted his train of thought to glance once more at the thermometer. Yes, yes, he muttered to himself. Yes, but supposing the heat goes on increasing, increasing as it's increased during the last few hours. My God, it's awful to contemplate! The house was very quiet when the frightened servants had left it. McQuillan and his sister made some attempt to eat the lunch which the housekeeper had prepared. But the attempt was a farce, and presently they found themselves pacing up and down, from room to room, from house to garden, waiting for they knew not what. There was no change in the atmosphere so far as the fog was concerned, but the thermometer rose steadily, until at six o'clock at night it was ninety, and they were feeling as if they must soon gasp for breath. And unknown to Addy, McQuillan went to the telephone and eventually got into communications with Dick Cockerlin, who was still at his city office. Dick, he said as steadily as he could, are you still there? I am, came back the answer, in tones that McQuillan could scarcely recognize. And how is it with you there? One word came along, McQuillan felt it to be the only word that could come. Hell! McQuillan shivered, and again spoke. Dick, what is happening? What? And then he was sharply rung off. From that moment he had no further communication with the outer world. Once, twice, thrice, he tried the telephone again before midnight. No response was given. All around the house a silence reigned, which was like the silence of a deserted ocean. Nothing but the fog was there. Not a voice, even of fear or terror, came up from the valley. And the heat went on steadily increasing. There was no sleep for McQuillan, or his sister, or the housekeeper that night. They had all changed into the lightest summer garments they could find. By the middle of the night the two women were laying prostrate with exhaustion, and the thermometer was a long way over a hundred degrees. McQuillan did all that knowledge could suggest to him to obtain relief and coolness for them, but there was no air. The atmosphere was still, lifeless, leaden. And when the morning came the all-enveloping fog was still there, and the heat was still increasing. How they got through that second day McQuillan never knew. He had visions of what might be going on in places where the water supply was bad. He, fortunately, was in command of a splendid and probably inexhaustible supply. He had, too, a well-stocked larder and a well-provided cellar of good wine. Only just able to crawl about he looked to the two women. The housekeeper, a woman of full habit, was more than once on the verge of collapse. Addie's wiriness and excellent physique kept her going. But as it grew to the second midnight they were all gasping for breath, and McQuillan, making brave efforts to keep the women alive, knew that before many hours were over all would be over for them, too. And then, as he lay stretched out in a lounging-chair, anxiously watching his sister, who lay on a sofa close by, the door pushed open, and Dick Cocherlin, reeling like a drunken man, staggered in and dropped headlong at McQuillan's side. Number 2 The Refuge McQuillan summoned up what strength remained in him, and set himself with clenched teeth and fierce resolution to bring Cocherlin round. Cocherlin was a big man, a fellow of brawn and muscle, that in ordinary times would have thought nothing of walking fifty miles on end if need arose. Now, looking at his great limbs, scarcely hidden by the thin silk shirt and flannel trousers which clothed them, McQuillan saw that he was wasted as if he had undergone starvation. His face had aged ten years, and there was a look of horror in its lines and in his half-open eyes which told of human fear and terror, and once more McQuillan wondered what was going on in London. He poured liquid, a weak mixture of brandy and seltzer, down the fallen man's throat. McQuillan glanced at his sister. She had paid no attention whatever to Cocherlin's entrance. She lay motionless, her hands clasped across her bosom, slowly and regularly gasping for breath. But McQuillan knew what would rouse her, for she and Cocherlin had been engaged for the past six months and were about to be married, and one great source of her anxiety during the past two days had been in her fears for his safety. And as he saw Cocherlin returning to consciousness he turned to her. Addy, he whispered, here is Dick. The girl slowly opened her eyes and turned her head, and a faint flesh came to her white cheeks. McQuillan reached across and handed her a glass out of which he had been giving her liquid food at intervals during the past hour. Drink that, and then get up and help me with him, he said. Cocherlin opened his eyes to the full at last, and saw the brother and sister, and he struggled up from the floor. I got through anyway, he said. I thought if we were all going to die, I'd see Addy first. Have I been fainting, Dan? Lie down again, Addy. This instant, commanded McQuillan sharply. Now then, Dick, drink the rest of that brandy and seltzer, and then you shall have some of this concentrated meat extract. No nonsense, now. What we all have to do is keep up strength till this passes. I'm off to our housekeeper. I forbid you two to move or to speak until I come back. When he returned, McQuillan found his sister staring at Cocherlin, and Cocherlin staring at her, as if they were looking their last at each other. Come, come, he said, with the best imitation of a laugh that he could raise. We are not at that stage yet. Now then, obey your doctor. And he fed them both as if they were children, and presently had the gratification of seeing the color come back to Cocherlin's face and a new light into his eyes. The big man suddenly rose, and shook his limbs, and smiled grimly. There were sandwiches on the table, and he reached over and took one in each hand, and began to eat voraciously. Chuck the nursing, Dan, he growled, I'm all right. I said I'd get it done, and I've done it. I'm here. McQuillan saw, with thankfulness, that Cocherlin was going to be something to stand by. He nodded, with assumed coolness. All right, old chap, he said. And how did you get here? Cocherlin moistened his tongue. Fought through it, he said grimly. I've been thirty hours at it. Thirty hours? Yes, said McQuillan. You know, continued Cocherlin. You know when you telephoned me at six last night? After that I think I went mad for a while. Then I got out of the office, and somehow got to the bank station of the South London. The tube trains ran now and then. I don't know how I did it, but I traveled that way as far as the trains ran. Clap them, or somewhere. And then, well, I just made along this way. Of course I knew every bit of the road. It was like sleepwalking. McQuillan nodded, and picking up a fan, resumed his occupation of trying to agitate the air about his sister's face. Well, you're here, Dick, he said. But London? Cockerel shivered. London is— Oh, I don't know what London is, he answered. I think half the people are dead, and the other half are mad. Once or twice I went out into the streets. One man you met was on his knees, praying aloud. The next was—oh, I don't know. It seemed that hell was let loose, and yet the churches were crammed to the doors. And people were fighting for the liquor in the dram shops and the public houses. I—I don't seem to remember much. Perhaps I am mad myself now. How long will it be, Dan? How long will it be, asked McQuillan? The—the end. I expect this is the end, isn't it? said Cockerelan. What else can it be? Don't talk rot, McQuillan said sharply. I thought you'd come round again. Here pour some of the stuff out of that bottle into that glass and carry it to the housekeeper in the next room. Pull yourself together, man. Sorry, said Cockerelan, and rose to carry out McQuillan's commands. I'm—I'm light-headed, perhaps. Don't ask me any more about what I saw. It sends me off. He went away to the housekeeper, and McQuillan heard him speaking to her in the dry, croaking tones in which they all spoke. Unpresently Cockerelan came hurriedly back, and standing at the open door beckoned him with a shaking hand. McQuillan rose and shambled across to him, looking and interrogation. Come out in the garden, whispered Cockerelan, and led the way to the front door. Listen! he said. I caught the sound in there. Listen! McQuillan grasped one of the pillars on the porch and strained his ears, and somewhere, so far off that it might have been a thousand miles away, he heard what he knew to be the coming of a mighty wind, and instinctively he tightened his grip on the pillar. It's a cyclone coming, Cockerelan, he shouted, though all around them was still and quiet. It'll sweep away all before it. House? Everything. Quick! The two women! But before either man could turn to open the door, the great fog was swept away before their eyes, as if it had been literally snatched from them by some gigantic hand from heaven, and where it had been was a burning and a dazzling light of such power that in an instant they were groveling on the ground before it, with their eyes pressed instinctively in the crooks of their quivering elbows. Part 3 Out of the Illimitable Of the two men McQuillan was the first to comprehend what had happened, and out of his comprehension came coolness and resource, ever had he thought so quickly in his life. Dick, he whispered, keep your eyes shut tightly, and turn, and creep back into the hall. I'm doing the same thing. You know the little room on the left? Don't open your eyes until you get there. Now then he continued with a gasp as the two men reached the room and stood upright. You can open them here, for the shutters are up. Ah! And yet, you see, although this room should be quite dark, it's almost as light as a normal winter morning. Cockerlin stared stupidly about him. For God's sake, Dan, what's happened, he exclaimed. McQuillan was fumbling in a drawer. He brought out two silk mufflers and passed one to his friend. I have a very good idea as to what's happened, he answered gravely. And I'll tell you in a few minutes. But first, muffle your eyes. There, you'll see through two thicknesses of the silk. Now for the women. Unfortunately, the curtains are closely drawn in both rooms, or I should have feared for their eyesight in that sudden rush of light. Light, Dick, such as the globe has never seen before. Dick, we've got to blindfold them and then get them into the darkest place in the house. There's an underground room, not a cellar, which I've sometimes used for experiments. We must get them downstairs. It was easy to see, in spite of the mufflers, that the light in the hall was blinding. And in the curtain study, as bright as on an open sea on a cloudless day in summer. And Addy was lying on the sofa, with her arms crossed over her forehead and eyes, obviously surprised and distressed by the sudden glare. Don't move your arms, exclaimed McQuillan sharply. Keep your eyes shut as tight as you can. What is it, she asked, has the fog gone and the sun come? The fog has gone and a sun has come, replied McQuillan, and its light is unbearable just yet. Now, Addy, I'm going to blindfold you and take you and Mrs. Jepsen down to the underground room. We will all have to get used to the light by degrees, do just what I tell you, and Dick and I will make you comfortable. But when the two women were safely disposed into a room into which scarcely any light ever penetrated in an ordinary way, but which was, then, as light as noon tied, McQuillan drew Cockerlin into the study and, groping his way to the windows, closed the shutters and drew the curtains over them. Now you can take off your muffler, he said quietly. There, you see, it's light enough even now to read print and to see the time, and, you perceive the time, half past twelve, midnight. Cockerlin's face blanched. He swallowed something and straightened himself. What is this, McQuillan, he asked quietly. Do you know? McQuillan shook his head. Not with certainty, he answered, but I think I know. Forty-eight hours ago I discovered a new star, which increased in magnitude at a surprising rate even while I watched it. Now I think that it is a new sun. A new sun, exclaimed Cockerlin, impossible. Call it what you will, said McQuillan. It is, I am certain, at any rate, a vast heavenly body of fire which was traveling towards this part of space at an inconceivable rate when I first saw it, and is, probably at this moment, nearer to us than our own sun is. Do you feel the heat is increasing? Yes, replied Cockerlin. But it is different in character. It is different in character because the wrapping of infinitely fine dust which has been round us has been drawn away, said McQuillan. But it will increase in intensity. McQuillan gripped the table. And, he whispered, in an hour or two we shall be shriveled up, consumed, like shreds of wool thrown into a furnace, answered McQuillan. Cockerlin straightened himself. All right, Dan, he said quietly, I'm glad I came here. What's to be done now? McQuillan had turned to a nest of drawers in one of the recesses of his study. He brought out some spectacles, fitted with lenses of very dark glass, and handed one to Cockerlin. We will make an attempt to see this new sun, he said. Put these spectacles on, and for the present, fold that muffler about your eyes again once. You'll see through the muffler and the spectacles, and now come up to the observatory. In the observatory, Cockerlin understood little or nothing of the preparations which McQuillan made. Conscious only of the terrible heat, he stood waiting and thinking of the terrible fate which was about to befall them, and suddenly a terrible impatience seized him. If there was but an hour or so to live, his place was with the woman he loved. Look here, Dan, he exclaimed, I'm going down. If the ends coming, then—but McQuillan laid a hand on his arm, and drew him forward, at the same time removing the muffler from his head. We will go down soon, Cockerlin, he said. We must, for we shall have to tell them. But first, look! You can look with safety, now. And then Cockerlin, following his friend's instructions, looked, and saw widespread above him the dome of the heavens. But never before had he so seen it in all his life. From north to south, from east to west, it glowed with the effulgence of shining brass, and in the north-east hung a great globe of fiery red, vaster in dimension, than the sun which the world had known till then, and even when seen through the protections which McQuillan had prepared, coruscating and glittering with darting and leaping flames. My God! said Cockerlin in a hushed voice. My God! Dan, is that it? That is it! answered McQuillan quietly. It is now nearly twice the magnitude of our sun, and it is coming nearer. This is no time to make calculations, or even speculations. But I believe it is, at any rate, as near to us as our sun is. Come away, Cockerlin, I want to look out on the world. Hold my hand and follow me. And he dragged Cockerlin away, through a trapped door, into a dark passage, and then into a darker room. Keep your hands over your spectacles for a while, and get accustomed to the light by degrees, he said. I am going to open an observation-shutter here, through which we can see a vast stretch of country to the north. It will be a surprise to me if much of it is not already in flames. Now, if you are ready, Cockerlin covered his eyes as he heard the click of the observation-shutter. Even then, and through the thick black glasses which he was wearing, he felt the extraordinary glare of the light which entered. Presently, McQuillan touched his arm. You can look now, he said. See, it's just as I thought, the lands on fire. Cockerlin looked out upon the great sweep of hill and valley, wood and common, which stretches across the fairest part of Surrey, from the heights above Shear and Albury, to those beyond Regget. He saw little villages, with their spires and towers and red roofs and tall gray gables. He saw the isolated farms, the stretches of wood, the hillside copuses, the patches of heath, and the expanse of green, which indicated land untouched by spade or plough. It was a scene with which he had been familiar from boyhood. Of late he had explored every nook and corner of it with Addie McQuillan, and at all times of the year it had seemed beautiful to him. But under the glare and brilliance of this extraordinary light everything seemed changed, and over that vast prospect great pillars of smoke and flame were rising to the sky. From the valley beneath them came the shrieks and cries of men and women, and as the two men watched they saw the evergreens in McQuillan's garden suddenly turn to the whiteness of paper and shrivel and disappear in fine ashes. Look there, whispered McQuillan, pointing a shaking finger, there, dorking's on fire and yonder, regate two. Cockerland tried to speak, but his tongue rattled in his mouth like a dry pee in a drier pod. He touched McQuillan's arm and pointed downward, and McQuillan nodded. Yes, he said. We had better go down to them, they've got to know. He took Cockerland by the hand, and led him back to the observatory, which, in spite of the fact that all the shutters were drawn, was full of light. As they stepped into it a spark of white flame suddenly appeared in the woodwork, and ran like lightning around the rim of the dome. On fire, McQuillan said quietly, it's no good, Cockerland, we can't do anything. The ends come, we—oh my God, what's this? What is this? Cockerland! Cockerland, where are you? For just as suddenly as they had seen the grayness of the great fog snatched away from the earth, so now they saw the extraordinary light which had succeeded it snatched away. It was gone in the flash of an eye, with the speed of lightning, and as it went they felt the earth move and shutter, and all around them fill a blackness such as they had never known. And as the two men gripped each other in their terror, there suddenly burst upon the dome of the observatory a storm of what seemed like bullets, fierce, insistent, incessant. The serpent-like tail of the fire in the woodwork quivered once and died out, and McQuillan, trembling at every limb, released his hold on Cockerland and staggered against the nearest wall. Rain, he said, rain! In the darkness McQuillan heard Cockerland first stumble about, and then fall heavily. Then he knew that Cockerland had fainted, and he made his way to a switch and turned on the electric light, and got water to bring him round. But when he came round, Cockerland for some minutes croaked and gabbled incessantly, and it was not until McQuillan had hurried down to the dining-room for Brandy for him that he regained his senses and was able to sit up, gasping, and staring about him. He pointed a shaking finger to the aperture in the dome, through which the rain was pouring, unheated by McQuillan, in a ceaseless cascade. Where is it? he gasped. What's come of it? McQuillan shook him to his feet, and made him swallow more Brandy. Pull yourself together, Cockerland, he said. This is no time to talk science. This is a time to act. Come down, man. We must see to the women. We've just escaped fire. Now we're likely to meet our deaths by water. Listen to that rain. Here. Close that shutter. Now, downstairs. It's lucky we're on a hillside, Cockerland, but the people in the valleys. Come on! And leaving Cockerland to follow him, McQuillan ran down through the house, to find his sister and the housekeeper in the hall. As he saw them, he knew that they had realized what he now had time to realize, that the terrible heat was dying away, and that it was becoming easier and easier to breathe. As he passed it, he glanced at the hanging thermometer, and saw the mercury falling in a steady, swift descent. McQuillan caught his sister in his arms, and pressed her to him. She looked anxiously into his face. Dick, she said. He's safe. He's coming, said McQuillan. Addy suddenly collapsed, and hit her face in her hands. The housekeeper was already in a heap in the nearest chair, sobbing and moaning. As Cockerland came slowly down the stairs, McQuillan saw that, strong man as he was, his nerves had been shaken so much that he was trembling like a leaf. Once more McQuillan had to summon all his energies together in the task of bringing his companions round, and as he moved about from one to the other, his quick ear heard the never-ceasing rattle of rain, which was heavier than any tropical rain that ever fell. And presently he caught the sound of newly forming cascades and waterfalls, cutting new ways from the hill-tops to the level lands of the valleys. Now the normal coolness of middle winter was coming back. The women picked up the wraps they had thrown aside. The men hurried into great coats, and as February dawn came gray and slow across the hills, McQuillan and Cockerland went up to the observatory, and into the little lookout turret from which they had seen the spires of smoke and flame rising from the land only a few hours before. The rain was still falling, but with no more violence than that of a tropical rainstorm. But the air was throbbing, pulsating, humming with the noise of falling waters. A hundred yards away from the house, a churning and seething mass of yellow foam was tearing a path wide and deep through a cusp of young pine. One in the valley, immediately beneath them, lay a newly formed lake. In the valleys on every side, as far as the eye could reach, lay patches of silvery hue which they knew to be great sheets of water, and now the air was cool and the hither-two tortured lungs could breathe in comfort. McQuillan said Cockerland after a long silence. What happened? But McQuillan shook his head. I am as a child standing at the edge of a great ocean, he answered. I cannot say, definitely. I think that the great star which we saw rushing upon us was suddenly arrested, split into fragments when that darkness fell and that we were saved. Once more, Cockerland, the old world, a speck of space, will move on. For look there! And Cockerland turned as McQuillan pointed, and saw, slowly rising over the surrey hills, the kindly sun of a gray February morning. End of The New Sun by J. S. Fletcher