Soldiers' record, 1868-10-31

              Devoted to tlie Interests of tUo Soldiei-s mid Sailoi-s of the late W a r .
VOL 1. HARTFORD, COm., OCOTBER 31, 1868. NO. 17
THE ORPHAN BOY.
By J. T. FORREST.
Where shall he find a bod •?
Where shall ho lay his head ?
Where even ask for bread 1 .
God only knows.
Shrilly the wind goes by,
With its deep, moaning sigh,
Making him wish to die-
In his cold clothes.
Wandering the streets alone,
Hearing the winds deep moan,
Sinking upon a stone
Footsore and weary.
Sleep weighs his eyelids down,
Fancy brings its diamond crown.
Gone the despairing frown.
Life seems less dreary.
Feeling no chilling cold
Creep through his clothing old;
Dreaming of wealth untold—
Joys without number.
Gone is his black despair,
Gone ev'ry thought of care;
Angels with golden hair
Watch o'er his slumber.
When the next morning bright,
With its effulgent light,
Gladdened the vvatchers sight.
Where was the night guest?
Dead on that winsome mora,
From earthly sorrows torn-
Fresh into heaven borne
He was at rest.
AN AUTUMN SONG.
What have the rustling leaves to say.
Fit to make us sad or glad f
"Ere the wind blewus away.
Much delight in life wo had.
" Now we both of us are sad.
Both of us would death defer—
You, because you are not glad ;
We, because wo always were."
This is what the brown leaves say.
With a sadness less than mine,
Dear, if I should die to-day,
Give me something to rosign.
ROBERT WEEKS.
i o i i r s a t f a i u L
THE MAN WITHOUT A COUN-TRY.
This was the first of some twenty such
transfers, which brought him sooner or la-ter
into half our best vessels, but which
kept him all his life at least some 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 cel-ebrated
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 onboard 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 wan-ted
to use Nolan's state-room for some-thing,
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 with the
wrong people," who would give him in-telligence.
'' So the dance went on, the
finest party that had ever been known, I
dare say; for I never heard of a man-of-war
ball that was not. For ladies they had
the family of the American consul, one or
two travellers wlio had adventured so far,
and a nice bevy of English girls and mat-rons,
perhaps Lady Hamilton herself.
Well, dill'erent officers relicvee each
other in standing and talking with Nolan
in a friendly way, so as to be sure that no-body
else spoke to him. The dancing went
on with spirit, and after a while even the
follows wlio took this honorary guard of
Nolan ceased to fear any contre-iemps.
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 con-tra-
dances. The black band, nothing
loath, conferred as to what "American
dances)" were, and started oiT with Vir-ginia
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 for his fiddles to begin, and
bent foward, about to say, in true negro
s t a t e , ' ' ' The Old Thirteen,' gentlemen
and ladies!" as he had said, " ' Virginny
Reel,' if you please ! " and " ' Money
Musk,' if you please !" the captain s boy
tapped him x)n 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 to,—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 Shubrick, who
was by him, could not hinder him. She
laughed, and said,—
" I am not Miss Rutlbdge any longer,
Mr. Nolan ; but I will dance all the same,"
just nodded to Shubrick, as if to say he
must leave Mr. Nolan to her, and led him
off to the place where the dance was form-ing.
Nolan thought he had got his chance
He liad 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 cotillions, or even in
the pauses of waltzing ; but there were
chances for tongues and sounds, as well
as for 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
lime at the bottom of the set, he said, bold-ly,—
a little pale, she said as she told me
the story, years after,—
" And what do you hear from home,
Mrs. G r a f f ?"
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 homo again !"—and she walked direct-ly
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 or-der
; nobody can now : and, indeed,! am
not trying to. These arc the traditions,
which I sort out, as I believe them, from
the myths which have been told about
chis 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 Pons went to
his grave in the belief that this was the
author of " Junius, " who was being pun-ished
for his celebrated libel on Thomas
Jefferson. Pons 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 sliip it vs^as on I cannot
tell. However, in one, at least, of the
great frigate-duels with the English, in
which the navy was really baptized, it hap-pened
that a round shot from tlie enemy en
tercd one of our ports square, and took
right down the officer of the gun himself,
and almost every man of the gun's crow.
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 sur-geon's
people were carrying off the bodies,
there appeared Nolan, in his shirt-sleeves,
with.the rammer in his hand, and, just as
if he had been the officer, told them off
with authority,who should go to the cock-pit
with the wounded men, who should
stay with him,—perfectly cheery, and
with that way which 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 that gun
keeping those fellows in spirits, till the
enemy struck,—sitting on the carriage
while the gun was cooling, though he was
exposed all the time,—showing them ea-sier
ways to handle heavy shot,—making
the raw hands laugh at their own bhrn^
ders,—and when the gun cooled again,
getting it loaded and fired twice as often
as any other gun on the ship. The cap-tain
walked foward, 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: that the Commo-dore
said,—
" I see you do, and I thank you, Sir;
and I never shall forget this day, Sir^ and
you never shall, Sir."
And after the Whole thing was over,
and he had the Englishman's sword, in
ihe midst of the state and ceremony of
the quarter-deck, he said,—
" Where is Mr. Nolan ? Ask Mr. No-lan
to come here."
And when Nolan came, the captain
said,—
" Mr. Nolan, we are all very grateful
to you to-day; you will be named in the
despatches."
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
nie 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 Commo-dore's.
The captain did mention him in the
despatches. It was always said 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 when they began
to ignore the whole transaction at Wash-ington,
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
Nukahiwa Islands. Not this Porter, you
know, but old Porter, his father, Essex
Porter,—that is, the old Essex Porter,
not this Essex. As an artillery officer,
who had seen service in the West, Nolan
knew more about fortifications, embra-sures,
ravelins, stockades, and all that,
than any of them did; and he worked
with a right good will in fixing that bat-tery
all right. I have always thought it
was a pity Porter did not leave him in
command there with Gamble. That
would have settled all the question about
his punishment. Wo should have kept
the islands, and at this moment we should
have one station in the Pacific Ocean.
Our French friends, too, when they
wanted this little watering-place, would
have found it was preoccupied. But
Madison and the Virginians, of course,
flung all that away.
All that was nearly fifty years ago.
If Nolan was thirty then, he must have
been near eighty when he died. He look-ed
sixty when he was forty. But he
never seemed to me to change a hair
afterwards. As I imagine his life, from
what I have seen and heard of it, ho must
have been in every sea, and yet almost
never on land. He must have known,
in a formal way, more officers in our
service than any man living knows. He
told me once, with a grave smile, that
no man in the world lived so methodical
a life as he. " You know the boys say I
am the Iron Mask, and you know how
busy be was." He said it did not do for
any one to try to read all the time, more
than to do anything else all the time ;
but that he read just five hours a day.
"Then," he said, " I keep up ray note-books,
writing in them at such and such
hours from what I have been reading;
and 1 include in these my scrap-books."
These were very curious indeed. He
had six or eight of different subjects.
There was one of History, one of Natural
Science, one 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 the men
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, that I
have ever seen in my life. I wonder
who will have Nolan's scrap-books.
To bo Continued.
CAPT. ALFRED DICKERSON.
Alfred Dickerson, whose sad and sudden
death on Saturday last, has brought deep
sorrow not only iuto the circle of his own
fiimily friends, but also into a much larger
circle of those who knew and loved him,
was born in Newburg, N. Y., in the year
1841 and was therefore twenty-seven
years of age when he died. He came to
this city in the year 1857, and found em-ployment
in the store of P. Jewell & Sons,
with whom he remained until the second
year of the late war, when he entered the
service of his country. Mr. Dickerson
enlisted in the 16th Connecticut regiment,
and went forth with it as Sergeant-Major
and shared with it the rough fortunes of
war from the bloody field of Antietam.to
which the regiment was ordered imme-diately
upon its arrival I'rom Hartford,to
the time of its capture at Plymouth by the
confederate General Hoke, on the 20th of
April, 1864. Just previous to the capture
of the regiment, he was promoted to the
office of Captain. While the privates
were sent to Andersonville, Captain Dick-erson,
with the other officers, Avas taken
first to Macon, and afterwards to Col-umbia,
S. C. From his prison there he,
in company with three or four brother
ofiicers, eflected an escape, and in a small
boat, by the kind help of the negroes,
through many trials and perils, succeeded
in safely descending the Santee river and
reaching one of the United States gunboats
off the mouth of the river. Afterwards
he rejoined the remnant of his regiment
at Newborn, where he remained until the
close of the war brought all the brave boys
in blue back to their homes again.
Resuming his employment in the service
of P. Jewell & Sons, Captain Dickerson
married, in the month of May, 1866, Mary,
the daughter of Mr. Ralph Foster, and
found a happy home of his own amid a host
of affectionate friends. Scarcely three
months ago the blessing of a little child
Was bestowed on his household. Captain
Dickerson was one of tlie most promising
young men in our city. He was widely
km)wn, warmly loved, universally respect-ed.
Faithful and brave as a soldier, his
heart was in the cause ol his country, and
ho was willing to give his life in her ser-vice.
Upright, frank, diligent, ambitious
of good things, and both persistent and
energetic in endeavor, he unconsciously
commendect him-self to the whole com-munity.
A certain line and pure enthu-siasm
was one of his decided characteris-tics,
and was always manifest in all that
he undertook to be or to do. With a will
and zeal and straightforward energy ho
did his manifest duty. In the year 1858,
at an early age, he joined the second church
of this city, and has stood constant and
steadfast in his profession, approving him-