night-dress was dry as it had ever been in the linen cupboard at her stately home; and her hair, though loose, was not untidy and would have pleased a lover, had she confessed one and had he, instead of another lady, been aiding her in distress. I had last seen these two pictures at Tregaron, and I sighed with a serene and pleasant recollection of the place, the season, and the company. I was glad also to see a third work of the same artist, or at least of the same school. It belonged to a different period, geological rather than marine; and again it must be insisted that the work was visionary because no one capable of a mere invention so ridiculous is likely to have the power and the patience to execute it with such completeness and finish. The scene was midnight in a valley of rocks and of high, precipitous, rocky sides, wide enough apart to have admitted a mountain torrent of some size. But it was dry, and over the sharp rocks went a most beautiful lady. She was dressed in thin and clinging garments from her shoulders down to her ankles. To meet a woman so beautiful and so suitably and yet unusually dressed all alone in the mountains would be at least as surprising as to see her on a little rock in the sea as one was passing in a storm. I could imagine her easily upon the velvet-covered rock. Her arms were bare, and with one she clasped a book to her left breast, while with the other she felt her way along the precipitous wall of the valley and steadied herself over the cruel rocks. It was to be noticed that there was no velvet over these rocks, and this is another proof of the genuineness of the artist’s vision, unless it should be suspected that he disliked the appearance of a long strip of carpet all down a valley. A fierce and extravagant vision, you will say. But the gentleness which had somehow ensured the carpet in the marine vision had not been eclipsed in the geological. From the edge of the farther wall of the valley shone a light. Someone was up there with a lantern and was turning its beams down on to the spot under the fair traveller’s feet. There could be little doubt that he was following her along with the light, but he could not be seen. The lantern would have been more _natural_ in a narrow alley in a town, but there was no question here of mere nature. If it comes to nature, was there ever a period when a woman of such beauty, and of very great refinement, strayed out with a book among inhospitable mountains, clad in a dress that was fitted rather to suggest and even display the form of limbs and bosom than to protect them from rocks, thorns, and weather, not to speak of men and other wild beasts? A voluptuous Oriental or Frenchman might of course sit down and invent an earthly paradise with a small population of like beauties, but their object would be as unmistakable as it would be objectionable to persons of sensibility and discipline, except when alone or off their guard. But