"Yes."

"And when did you find time to do them? They have taken much time, and
some thought."

"I did them in the last two vacations I spent at Lowood, when I had no
other occupation."

{155} "Where did you get your copies?"

"Out of my head."

"That head I see now on your shoulders?"

"Yes, sir."

"Has it other furniture of the same kind within?"

"I should think it may have. I should hope--better."

He spread the pictures before him, and again surveyed them alternately.

While he is so occupied, I will tell you, reader, what they are, and
first, I must premise that they are nothing wonderful. The subjects
had, indeed, risen vividly on my mind. As I saw them with the
spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them, they were striking;
but my hand would not second my fancy, and, in each case, it had
wrought out but a pale portrait of the thing I had conceived.

These pictures were in water-colours. The first represented clouds low
and livid, rolling over a swollen sea: all the distance was in eclipse;
so, too, was the foreground; or, rather, the nearest billows, for there
was no land. One gleam of light lifted into relief a half-submerged
mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with
foam; its beak held a gold bracelet, set with gems, which I had touched
with as brilliant tints as my pencil could impart. Sinking below the
bird and mast, a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair
arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been
washed or torn.

The second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak of a
hill, with grass and some leaves slanting {156} as if by a breeze.
Beyond and above spread an expanse of sky, dark blue, as at twilight;
rising into the sky was a woman's shape to the bust, portrayed in tints
as dusk and soft as I could combine. The dim forehead was crowned with
a star; the lineaments below were seen as through the suffusion of
vapour; the eyes shone dark and wild; the hair streamed shadowy, like a
beamless cloud torn by storm or by electric travail. On the neck lay a
pale reflection like moonlight: the same faint lustre touched the train
of thin clouds from which rose and bowed this vision of the Evening
Star.

The third showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter
sky: a muster of northern lights reared their dim lances, close
serried, along the horizon. Throwing these into distance, rose, in th