ating with vagabonds,'--but he left the sentence unfinished.

'I confess, Mr. Wilderspin,' said I, 'that you speak in such enigmas
that it would be folly for me to attempt to answer you.'

'I wish,' said Wilderspin, 'that all enigmas were as soluble as this.
Let me ask you a question, sir. When you stood before my picture,
"Faith and Love," in Bond Street, did you not perceive that both it
and the predella were inspired entirely by your father's great work,
_The Veiled Queen_, or rather that they are mere pictorial
renderings and illustrations of that grand effort of man's soul in
its loftiest development?'

I had never heard of the picture in question. As for the book, my
father, perceiving my great dislike of mysticism, had always shrunk
from showing me any effusion of his that was not of a simply
antiquarian kind. In Switzerland, however, after his death, while
waiting for the embalmer to finish his work, I had become, during a
few days' reading, acquainted with _The Veiled Queen_. It was a new
edition containing an 'added chapter,' full of subtle spiritualistic
symbols. Amid what had seemed to me mere mystical jargon about the
veil of Isis being uplifted, not by Man's reason, not by such
researches as those of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and the continental
evolutionists, but by Faith and Love, I had come across passages of
burning eloquence.

'I am sorry to say,' I replied, 'that my Gypsy wanderings are again
answerable for my shortcomings. I have not yet seen your picture.
When I do see it I--'

'Not seen "Faith and Love" and the equally wonderful predella at the
foot of it!' he exclaimed incredulously. 'Ah, but you have been
living among the Gypsies. It is the greatest picture of the modern
world; for, Mr. Aylwin, it renders in Art the inevitable attitude of
its own time and country towards the unseen world, and renders it as
completely as did the masterpiece of Polygnotus in the Lesche of the
'Not in the flesh; in the spirit, who knows him so well? Your mother
I have had the pleasure of meeting at the house of Lord Sleaford, and
indeed I have had the distinguished honour of painting her portrait;
but the great author of _The Veiled Queen_--the inspired designer of
the vignette symbolical of the Renascence of Wonder in Art--I never
had the rapture of seeing. This very day, the anniversary of his
birth,' he continued, 'is a great day in the Aylwinian calendar.'

'My father's birthday? Why, so it is!'

'Mr. A