been diligent in my research--the thing is unknown
even to the best-informed of art experts. Perhaps it is as well that I
describe it in detail.

It seemed to represent action upon a small plateau or table rock, drab
and bare, with a twilight sky deepening into a starless evening. This
setting, restrainedly worked up in blue-grays and blue-blacks, was not
the first thing to catch the eye, however. The front of the picture was
filled with lively dancing creatures, as pink, plump and naked as
cherubs and as patently evil as the meditations of Satan in his rare
idle moments.

I counted those dancers. There were twelve of them, ranged in a
half-circle, and they were cavorting in evident glee around a central
object--a prone cross, which appeared to be made of two stout logs with
some of the bark still upon them. To this cross a pair of the pink
things--that makes fourteen--kneeling and swinging blocky-looking
hammers or mauls, spiked a human figure.

I say _human_ when I speak of that figure, and I withhold the word in
describing the dancers and their hammer-wielding fellows. There is a
reason. The supine victim on the cross was a beautifully represented
male body, as clear and anatomically correct as an illustration in a
surgical textbook. The head was writhed around, as if in pain, and I
could not see the face or its expression; but in the tortured tenseness
of the muscles, in the slaty white sheen of the skin with jagged streaks
of vivid gore upon it, agonized nature was plain and doubly plain. I
could almost see the painted limbs writhe against the transfixing nails.

By the same token, the dancers and hammerers were so dynamically done as
to seem half in motion before my eyes. So much for the sound skill of
the painter. Yet, where the crucified prisoner was all clarity, these
others were all fog. No lines, no angles, no muscles--their features
could not be seen or sensed. I was not even sure if they had hair or
not. It was as if each was picked out with a ray of light in that
surrounding dusk, light that revealed and yet shimmered indistinctly;
light, too, that had absolutely nothing of comfort or honesty in it.

* * * * *

"Hold on, there!" came a sharp challenge from the stairs behind and
below me. "What are you doing? And what's that picture doing?"

I started so that I almost lost my footing and fell upon the
speaker--one of the Museum guards. He was a slight old fellow and his