red," 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,