Referring to the copy again, I saw that it purported to be the work of “Rudentia Jones, Fellow of the Palaeontologic Society, Entomologist to the Institute for Harmonizing the Universes, and Ruler of Subaqueous Creation, excepting the Finny Mammalia.”

“Ah!  I see,” said I; “a capital title for a satire!”

“Life is too grave, and science too sacred,” replied my visitor, “for the indulgence of idle banterings.  The work is mine; I am its hero; and it is all true.”  He wore so earnest a face, and looked so directly and intelligently at me, that I forebore to smile.  “I have travelled in strange countries,” he said; “Nature has been bountiful in her revelations to me, indeed; my experiences have been so individual, that I sometimes discredit them myself.  I do not complain that others ridicule them.”

He spoke in the manner of one devoted to his species; and an easy dignity, which some trace to high birth and the consciousness of dominion, became him very naturally.  The eldest of the admirals, or old Neptune himself, could not have seemed more kingly; but once or twice he started at a noise from the publishing-house, as if longing to get back to his legitimate brine.  I told him to leave the manuscript in my hands for a fortnight, that I might form an opinion as to its claims for publication.

“No!” he said quickly.  “It is not a girl’s romance, or a boy’s poem, or the strollings of a man-errant:  it is of such rare value that gold cannot purchase it; it is so priceless that I cannot own it myself; it is like the air, or the water, or the light, or the magnet—­the property of all the peoples.  It must not leave my sight.  I must read it to you now!”

He literally held me with his eye.  He stood erect dilating, until he seemed to reach the height of a mainmast, as long and lank and brown as the subject of the veritable rime; and his ears, contracted, flapped like the pectorals of a flying-fish.  It was uncertain whether he was going to fly or swim, or seize and shake me.  I believed him to be either a lunatic or an apparition; but when the frenzy of the moment was over, he became a very harmless, kindly, and grave old gentleman, who begged my pardon for transgressing decorum in the enthusiasm for his “great work.”  He still smelled abominably of fish, but I could not take it into my heart to be harsh with this most pertinacious of authors.

I had been but a short time in the service of Spry, Stromboli & Smith, and my nerves had not yet been exercised by sensitive and eccentric writers.  I had led a vagabond career myself, and had frequent reason, in my incipient literary days, to be grieved with publishers’ “readers;” and when promoted to the same exalted place, I resolved to be charitable, careful, and obliging—­to do as I would be done by—­to crush no delicate Keats, to enrage no Johnson, by slight, prejudice, or deprecation.  But to suffer the infliction of a crack-brained old naturalist, repeating an interminable manuscript in my own office, went beyond my best resolve!  Still there was little to do.  It would be a paltry task to select a poem for illustration, and had not this same Ancient Mariner suggested an admirable one?