Floating there was the body of a drowned child. I gave a cry of pity and stooped down to look at him. It was a naked boy of some two years, exceedingly beautiful. I stooped lower and gazed into his upturned face. It was the face of my own child. It could not be; I had myself seen him, with my own eyes, far from here, in his mother’s arms, many months ago,--and yet, the longer I gazed upon him, the more certainly I knew that it was my own child. I could not be deceived. I leaned down closer and put my arms under him and drew him up and folded him to my breast. He was cold and wet, but beautiful beyond anything I had ever dreamed of him. I stood up, and held his cheek against my own. It seemed to me I had never known until this moment how dear he had been to me. I leaned, almost fainting, against the face of the rock, and rested his fair round body in my arm for a moment against a smooth shelf in the wall. His little shoulder lightly touched the rock; and where it touched, a slight depression seemed to appear, as if the rock had been a cushion. As I looked, the depression grew deeper and wider; it deepened and widened until it became a hollow vault, in which I could see nothing but darkness. Holding the fair boy close to my breast, I stepped into the dark vault, and walked carefully forward toward the interior of the rock. In a moment the passage made a turn to the right, and I found myself in a brightly lighted room with a peaked ceiling, very lofty, whose floor and walls were all of mother-of-pearl. In sconces on the walls were hundreds of burning candles, and divans and chairs covered with the richest silks were ranged beneath them. A door in the opposite wall stood open, and I entered through this another room of the same kind, with peaked ceiling, candles, mother-of-pearl, and all. As I stood in this room I heard the tinkling of a musical instrument and the singing of a voice. A door stood open opposite me as before, and through this I entered a third room, precisely like the others, and stopped in amazement. There, on a divan against the wall, under a blaze of candles, sat my wife. _The Laughing Nymph in the Three-Spired Rock_ She was singing gayly and accompanying her song upon a lute. When she saw me she laughed merrily and bade me sit down beside her. I remained standing where I was, doubting whether I had lost my senses, and hugging the beautiful child to my breast. There was no mistake. It was my wife indeed. I forgot for the moment the strangeness of the encounter, and went to her and held out the child. “See!” I cried. “Have done with laughing! Your child! He is drowned! I have brought him to you! See!” She looked at me with such merriment in her face as I had never seen there before. She laughed again and again. I thought she would never have done laughing. I was petrified with horror. “Stop!” I cried. “I must make you understand me! It is your child! Do you understand? Can you look at him and laugh? For shame, for shame!”