he turned to Wynnie. "Miss Walton will remember--I think she was making a
drawing of the rock at the same time I was--how the seagulls, or some such
birds--only two or three of them--kept flitting about the top of it?"

"I remember quite well," answered Wynnie, with a look of appeal to me.

"Yes," I interposed; "my daughter, in describing what she had been
attempting to draw, spoke especially of the birds over the rock. For she
said the white lapping of the waves looked like spirits trying to get
loose, and the white birds like foam that had broken its chains, and risen
in triumph into the air."

Here Mr. Niceboots, for as yet I did not know what else to call him, looked
at Wynnie almost with a start.

"How wonderfully that falls in with my fancy about the rock!" he said.
"Purgatory indeed! with imprisoned souls lapping at its foot, and the free
souls winging their way aloft in ether. Well, this world is a kind of
purgatory anyhow--is it not, Mr. Walton?"

"Certainly it is. We are here tried as by fire, to see what our work
is--whether wood, hay, and stubble, or gold and silver and precious
stones."

"You see," resumed the painter, "if anybody only glanced at my little
picture, he would take those for sea-birds; but if he looked into it, and
began to suspect me, he would find out that they were Dante and Beatrice on
their way to the sphere of the moon."

"In one respect at least, then, your picture has the merit of corresponding