large reversible
blackboard had recently been placed, and on a chair in front of it
stood Beryl, engrossed in putting the finishing touches to a sketch
which filled the entire board; and oblivious for the moment of Eve
Werneth's baby, who, having emptied her bottle of milk, had pulled
herself up by the chair, and with the thumb of her right hand in her
mouth, was staring up at the picture.

The lesson selected for the Sunday afternoon Bible class, which Beryl
had so successfully organized among a few of the female convicts, was
the fifteenth chapter of Luke; and at the top of the blackboard was
written in large letters: "Rejoice with Me, for I have found My sheep
which was lost." She had drawn in the foreground the flock couched in
security, rounded up by the collie guard in a grassy meadow; in the
distance, overhanging a gorge, was a bald, precipitous crag, behind
which a wolf crouched, watching the Shepherd who tenderly bore in his
arms the lost wanderer. On the opposite side of the blackboard had been
carefully copied the Gospel Hymn beginning:--

"There were ninety and nine that safely lay, In the shelter of the
fold, But one was out on the hills away, Far off from the gates of
gold--Away on the mountains wild and bare, Away from the tender
Shepherd's care."

Mental processes are strangely dualistic, and it not unfrequently
happens that while one is consciously intent upon a certain train of
thought, some secret cunning current of association sets in vibration
the coil of ideas locked in the chambers of memory, and long forgotten
images leap forth, startling in their pristine vividness.

Absorbed by the text she was illustrating, the artist insensibly
followed lines she deemed imaginary, yet when the sketch was
completed, the ensemble suddenly confronted her as a miniature
reproduction of a very distant scene, that had gladdened her childish
heart in the blessed by-gone. Far away from the beaten track of travel,
in a sunny cleft of the Pistoian Apennines, she saw the white fleeces
grouped under vast chestnuts, the flash of copper buckets plunged by
two peasant women into a gurgling fountain, the curly head of Bertie
bowed over the rude stone basin, as he gayly coaxed the bearers to let
him drink from the beautiful burnished copper; the rocky terraces cut
in the beetling cliffs above, where dark ruby-red oleanders flouted the
sky with fragrant banners; and the pathetic face of a vagrant ewe
tangled among vin