“Is it not strange,” he said, “that men should take pleasure in killing—especially helpless creatures like that, so full of innocent contentment? It seems to me the greatest pity to stop such a life! Did you ever notice in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the point at which the dead bird falls from the neck of the man?”

“I don’t even know what you are talking about,” answered Barbara. “Do tell me. It sounds like something I should like! Is it a story?”

“Yes—a wonderful story.”

The volume in which Richard had first read the story had come into his hands as one of a set his father had to bind. It belonged to a worshipper of Coleridge, who had possessed himself of every edition of every book he had written, or had had a share in writing. There he read first the final form of The Rime as it appeared in the Sibylline Leaves of 1817. But when he came to look at that in the Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798, he found differences many and great between the two. He also found in the set an edition with a form of the poem differing considerably from the last as well as the first. He had brought together and compared all these forms of the poem, noting every minutest variation—a mode of study which, in the case of a masterpiece, richly repays the student. It was no wonder, therefore, that Richard had almost every word of it on the very tip of his tongue.

He began to repeat the ballad, and went on, never for a moment pausing in his work. Without the least attempt at what is called recitation, of which happily he knew nothing, he made both sense and music tell, saying it as if he were for the hundredth time reading it aloud for his own delight. If his pronunciation was cockneyish, it was but a little so.

The very first stanza took hold of Barbara. She sat down by Richard’s table, softly laid the dying bird in her lap, and listened with round eyes and parted lips, her rapt soul sitting in her ears.

But Richard had not gone far before he hesitated, his memory perplexed between the differing editions.

“Have you forgotten it? I am so sorry!” said Barbara. “It is wonderful—not like anything I ever heard, or saw, or tasted before. It smells like a New Zealand flower called—” Here she said a word Richard had never heard, and could never remember. “I don’t wonder at your liking books, if you find things in them of that sort!”

“I’ve not exactly forgotten it,” answered Richard. “But I’ve copied out different editions for comparison, and they’ve got a little mixed in my head.”

“But surely the printers, with all their blunders and changes, can’t keep you from seeing what the author wrote!”