witzerland, 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
Cnidians at Delphi--as completely as did the wonderful frescoes of
Andrea Orcagna on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa.'

'And you attribute your success to the inspiration you derived from
my father's hook?'

'To that and to the spirit of Mary Wilderspin in heaven.'

'Then you are a Spiritualist?'

'I am an Aylwinian, the opposite (need I say?) of a Darwinian.'

'Of the school of Blake, perhaps?' I asked.

'Of the school of Blake? No. He was on the right road; but he was a
writer of verses! Art is a jealous mistress, Mr. Aylwin: the painter
who rhymes is lost. Even the master himself is so much the weaker by
every verse he has written. I never could make a rhyme in my life,
and have faithfully shunned printer's ink, the black blight of the
painter. I am my own school; the school of the spirit world.'

'I am very curious,' I said, 'to know in what way my father and the
spirits can have inspired a great painter. Of the vignette I may
claim to know something. Of the spirits as artists I have of course
no knowledge, but as regards my father, he, I am certain, could
hardly have told a Raphael from a chromolithograph copy. He was, in
spite of that same vignette, most ignorant of art. Raxton Hall
possesses nothing but family portraits.'

IV

By this time we had reached the encampment, which was close by a
waterfall among ferns an