It was part of Mavering's travelling-kit and baggage of the nomad, this gift of his, to be among tellers of stories, rare and excellent. For soldiers around camp-fires, old women in doorways, gentlemen at clubs and dinner-tables, newsboys in the city, school-children in the country with tin lunch-pails, farmer, tramp, hod-carrier, doctor, clergyman, blackleg, maiden in silk or gingham--it was all one; they forgot themselves and country and kin and present purpose till he was through. The "Ancient Mariner's" spell was not peculiar to that mariner. It is more ancient than he, older than books, older than written language, older than any city in pyramid or institution, practised among hunters of wild beasts on the site of Damascus, and among those who first scratched the fat soil of the Mesopotamian valley, the spell of the teller. His method is anything convenient, a ballad chanted to a harp, or a printed book. He speaks his mind and says what seems good to him as he goes, for the basis of it is the story, and the force is the force of the man. Mavering practised the primitive and personal method, and was heaven-born to it. His narrative ran from the beginning of the summer, when he had come south as a correspondent and joined the army in the Peninsula, went on with easy gait and leaping of spaces, gave glimpses and incidents by the way, dropped out a month, fell upon the middle of September, and drew to a close. "Wherever I went that day over the hills, behind the guns I saw that cornfield, or else where the cornfield was underneath and not to be seen itself on account of lying in the middle of explosion, with wickedness and confusion on one side, and sin and the reward thereof on the other, all blackguarding each other across it, so that it was covered with their blasphemous breath; till I had a superstition about that cornfield, and said, 'If corn could be gathered therefrom, and corn whiskey made thereof, it would be a chemical anarchy of the choicest, a combative distillation unexcelled, a superior brand of whiskey.' It was dusk when I came to the cornfield at last, and the battle had gone to sleep in its cradle. The stretcher-men were in the corn, and they told me to ride around the edge where the mess wasn't so thick. Their idea seemed to be good. So that I never went into that cornfield, though it was probably different from all the other cornfields, but came around into a road beyond it. There were men burning rails for camp-fires, and the woods were black, and the anchorite was strolling along, looking up at the young moon, same way he always did." Mavering paused a moment and puffed his cigar, took it out and looked at it, and deepened his deep voice. "I search in vain among the sere and yellow leaves of memory, whether it was ever in me to suck the end of a moonbeam in place of a cigar." He appealed to Rachel, who answered cheerfully and surprised him again: "Oh yes, it was, and so it must be still."