s, 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?"

I had not.

Booth thereupon rang the bell, and when the boy presented himself,
called for a Bible. _Garcon_ disappeared, and came back soon with a
Bible on a waiter.

Our tragedian took the book, and proceeded to argue his point by means
of texts selected skilfully here and there, from Genesis to Revelation.
He referred to the fact that it was not till after the Deluge men were
allowed, "for the hardness of their hearts," as he maintained, to eat
meat. But in the beginning it was not so; only herbs were given to man,
at first, for food. He quoted the Psalmist (Psalm civ. 14) to show that
man's food came from the earth, and was the green herb; and contended
that the reason why D