“Was he a relative?”

“Distant,” said he, and changed the subject.

It is twenty-seven years since these events took place, and I do not pretend to give the conversation very accurately, but what occurred was very much like this.  It was a dialogue between Booth and myself, the third party saying not a word during the evening.  Mr. Booth first asked me to take a glass of wine, or a cigar, both of which I declined.

“Well,” said he, “let me try to entertain you in another way.  When you came in, I was reading aloud to my friend.  Perhaps you would like to hear me read.”

“I certainly should,” said I.

“What shall I read?”

“Whatever you like best.  What you like to read I shall like to hear.”

“Then suppose I attempt Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’?  Have you time for it?  It is long.”

“Yes, I should like it much.”

So he read aloud the whole of this magnificent poem.  I have listened to Macready, to Edmund Kean, to Rachel, to Jenny Lind, to Fanny Kemble,—­to Webster, Clay, Everett, Harrison Gray Otis,—­to Dr. Channing, Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell Phillips, Father Taylor, Ralph Waldo Emerson,—­to Victor Hugo, Coquerel, Lacordaire; but none of them affected me as I was affected by this reading.  I forgot the place where I was, the motive of my coming, the reader himself.  I knew the poem almost by heart, yet I seemed never to have heard it before.  I was by the side of the doomed mariner.  I was the wedding-guest, listening to his story, held by his glittering eye.  I was with him in the storm, among the ice, beneath the hot and copper sky.  Booth became so absorbed in his reading, so identified with the poem, that his tone and manner were saturated with a feeling of reality.  He actually thought himself the mariner,—­so I am persuaded,—­while he was reading.  As the poem proceeded, and we plunged deeper and deeper into its mystic horrors, the actual world receded into a dim, indefinable distance.  The magnetism of this marvellous interpreter had caught up himself, and me with him, into Dreamland, from which we gently descended at the end of Part VI., and “the spell was snapt.”

  “And now, all in my own countree,
  I stood on the firm land,”—­

returned from a voyage into the inane.  Again I found myself sitting in the little hotel parlor, by the side of a man with glittering eye, with a third somebody on the other side of the table.

I drew a long breath.

Booth turned over the leaves of the volume.  It was the collected Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats.

“Did you ever read,” said he, “Shelley’s argument against the use of animal food, at the end of ’Queen Mab’?”

“Yes, I have read it.”

“And what do you think of the argument?”

“Ingenious, but not satisfactory.”

“To me it is satisfactory.  I have long been convinced that it is wrong to take the life of an animal for our pleasure.  I eat no animal food.  There is my supper,”—­pointing to the plate of bread.  “And, indeed,” continued he, “I think the Bible favors this view.  Have you a Bible with you?”