hardly count this work at all. I am chiefly amusing, or rather pleasing, my
own fancy at present."

"Apparently," I remarked, "you had the conical rock outside the hay for
your model, and now you are finishing it with your back turned towards it.
How is that?"

"I will soon explain," he answered. "The moment I saw this rock, it
reminded me of Dante's Purgatory."

"Ah, you are a reader of Dante?" I said. "In the original, I hope."

"Yes. A friend of mine, a brother painter, an Italian, set me going with
that, and once going with Dante, nobody could well stop. I never knew what
intensity _per se_ was till I began to read Dante."

"That is quite my own feeling. Now, to return to your picture."

"Without departing at all from natural forms, I thought to make it suggest
the Purgatorio to anyone who remembered the description given of the place
_ab extra_ by Ulysses, in the end of the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno.
Of course, that thing there is a mere rock, yet it has certain mountain
forms about it. I have put it at a much greater distance, you see, and have
sought to make it look a solitary mountain in the midst of a great water.
You will discover even now that the circles of the Purgatory are suggested
without any approach, I think, to artificial structure; and there are
occasional hints at figures, which you cannot definitely detach from the
rocks--which, by the way, you must remember, were in one part full of
sculptures. I have kept the mountain near enough, however, to indicate
the great expanse of wild flowers on the top, which Matilda was so busy