"You fear I am on the point of breaking into a divine frenzy," laughed the little man. "But I haven't yet confounded dreams and reality. That I have seen her, and have learned from her all sorts of things that other mortals do not yet know, is certain. But I believe myself that I only dreamed all this. It was on my very first morning out here. The evening before I had been reading the _Last Centaur_. The birds woke me very early, and then I lay for a few hours with closed eyes, and the whole story passed before me in a continuous train." "What story?" "I am now at work sketching it, after my own fashion, against which you will protest again. There is a cyclus of six or eight pictures--shall I tell you the story just as I am building it up in outline? It ought properly to be told in verse, but I am no poet. Enough, the scene opens with a mountain-cliff somewhere or other, the Hoesselberg, let us say, or any other mythological fastness in which a goddess could have lived apart from the world for a few centuries. From out it steps our dear Venus of Milo in proper person, leading by the hand a half-grown boy, who is no less a person than the little Amor. They are both but scantily clad, and gaze around with wondering eyes upon a world that has greatly changed since last they saw it. A city lies before them, with battlements and towers of strange shape standing out against the sky. Horsemen and pedestrians are coming out of the gate, dressed in bright-colored garments of a peculiar cut, which were nowhere in fashion in the world when the old gods were worshiped. The sky is clouded over, and a drizzling rain is gently falling, which forces the lady and her little boy to seek another place of refuge, since they can no longer find their way back to their old retreat. Yet they lack the courage to enter the town, with its swarming mass of human beings. But in the mountain over across the valley stands a high stone building, from which a tower, with a beautiful chime of bells, seems to ring out over the land an invitation for all men to draw near. It is true, this cannot be expressed in the sketch, but then the cloister over on the hill must have something homelike about it, so that everybody will understand why the fugitives, standing below in the rain, under shelter of a laurel bush, are gazing up at it with longing eyes. And now, when the sun breaks forth again, they muster up their courage and knock at the cloister gate. The nuns rush out at the cry their sister gate-keeper utters when she sees this queenly woman, with the black-eyed child of the gods, standing on the threshold, both half naked, and with their blonde hair falling about their shoulders. Then, too, as is natural, the nun understands no Greek, which would have enabled her to interpret the stranger's request for hospitality; nor can the abbess herself make out anything more as to the strangers' origin and character. But of one thing she is certain--this is not a