upper ones of Mr. Nahum's tower. Until that moment I did not know how frightened I had been. Yet why, or at what, I cannot even now decide.

But I soon overcame this folly. Miss Taroone made no inquiry how I had fared on this first visit to Mr. Nahum's fortress. As I have said, she seldom asked questions-except with her eyes, expressions, and hands. But some time afterwards, and after two or three spells of exploration, I myself began to talk to her of the strange things up there.

"I have looked at a good many, Miss Taroone. But the pictures! Some of them are of places I believe I know. I wish I could be a traveller and see what the others are of. Did Mr. Nahum paint them all himself?"

Miss Taroone was sitting bolt upright in a highbacked chair, her eyes and face very intent, as always happened when Mr. Nahum's name was mentioned.

"I know very little about them, Simon. When Nahum was younger he used to make pictures of Thrae, and of the woods and valleys hereabouts. There are boxfulls put away. Others are pictures brought back from foreign parts, but many of them, as I believe, she turned her face and looked into a shadowy corner of the room, "are pictures of nothing on earth. He has his two worlds. Take your time. Some day you too, I dare say, will go off on your travels. Remember that, like Nahum, you are as old as the hills which neither spend nor waste time, but dwell in it for ages, as if it were light or sunshine. Some day perhaps Nahum will shake himself free of Thrae altogether. I don't know, myself, Simon. This house is enough for me, and what I remember of Sure Vine, compared with which Thrae is but the smallest of bubbles in a large glass."

I do not profess to have understood one half of what

Miss Taroone meant in these remarks. It was in English and yet in a hidden tongue.

But by this time I had grown to be bolder in her company, and pounced on this :-"What, please Miss Taroone, do you mean by the 'two worlds'? Or shall I ask downstairs?" I added the latter question because now and then in the past Miss Taroone had bidden me go down to Linnet Sara for my answers. She now appeared at first not to have heard it.

"Now I must say to you, Simon," she replied at last, folding her hands on her knee, "wherever you may be in that body of yours, you feel you look out of it, do you not?"

I nodded.

"Yes, Miss Taroone."

"Now think, then, of Mr. Nahum's round room; where is that?"

"Up there," said I, pointing up a rambling finger. "Ah!" cried Miss Taroone, "so it may be. But even if to-morrow you are thousands of miles distant from here on the other side of this great Ball, or in its bowels, or flying free—you will still carry a picture of it, will you not? And that will be within you?"

"Yes, in my mind, Miss Taroone?" I answered rather sheepishly.

"In your mind," she echoed me, but not as if she were particularly pleased at the fact. "Well, many of the pictures I take it in Mr. Nahum's round tower are of that world. His MIND. I have never examined them. My duties are elsewhere. Your duty is to keep your senses, heart and courage and to go where you are called. And in black strange places you will at times lose yourself and find yourself, Simon. Now Mr. Nahum is calling. Don't think of me too much. I have great faith in him. Sit up there with him then. Share your eyes with his pictures. And having seen. them, compare them if you will. Say, This is this, and

that is that. And make of all that he has exactly what use you can."

With this counsel in my head I once more groped my way up the corkscrew stone staircase, and once more passed on from picture to picture; in my engrossment actually knocking my head against the dangling footbones of Mr. Nahum's treasured and now unalarming skeleton.

The pictures were of all kinds and sizes-in water colour, in chalks, and in oil. Some I liked for their vivid colours and deep shadows, and some I did not like at all. Nor could I always be sure even what they were intended to represent. Many of them completely perplexed me. A few of them seemed to me to be absurd; some made me stupidly ashamed; and one or two of them terrified me. But I went on examining them when I felt inclined, and a week or so after, as I was lifting out one of them into the sunshine, by chance it twisted on its cord and disclosed its wooden back.

And there, pasted on to it, was a scrap of yellowing paper with the letters BLAKE, followed by a numberCXLVII, in Roman figures. As with this one, so with the others. Each had its name and a number.

And even as I stood pondering what this might mean, my eyes rested on a lower shelf of one of Mr. Nahum's cases of books-book-cases which I have forgotten to say stood all round the lower part of the room. I had already discovered that many of these books were the writings of travellers in every part of the globe. One whole book-case consisted of what Mr. Nahum appeared to call Kitchen Work. But the one on a lower shelf which had now taken my attention was new to me an enormous, thick, home-made-looking volume. covered in a greenish shagreen or shark-skin.

Scrawled in ungainly capitals on the strip of vellum pasted to the back of this book was its title: THE

OTHERWORLDE. Would you believe it?-at first I was stupid enough to suppose this title was one word, a word in a strange tongue, which I pronounced to myself as best I could, THEEOTHAWORLDIE-saying the TH as in thimble. And that is what, merely for old sake's sake, I have continued to call the book in my mind to this day!

I glanced out of the window. The upper boughs of the yew-wood and the stones this side of it among the bright green grasses were impurpled by the reflected sunlight. Nothing there but motionless shadows. I stood looking vacantly out for a moment or two; then stooped and lugged out the ponderous fusty old volume on to the floor and raised its clumsy cover.

To my surprise and pleasure, I found, that attached within was the drawing of a boy of about my own age, but dressed like a traveller, whose face faintly resembled a portrait I had noticed on the walls downstairs, though this child had wings painted to his shoulders and there was a half circle of stars around his head. Beneath this portrait in the book, in small letters, was scrawled in a faded handwriting, NAHUM TARUNE. This, then, was Mr. Nahum when he was a boy. It pleased me to find that he was no better a speller than myself. He had not even got his own name right! I liked his face. He looked out from under his stars at me, full in the eyes.

Next-after I had searched his looks and clothes and what he carried pretty closely-I turned over a few of the stiff leaves and found more of his writing with a big VII scrawled on the top. On page one of this book you will find the writing. I should have been a stupider boy even than I was if I had not at once turned over the pictures till I came to that with VII on the label on the back of it. This picture was of a Maze outlined in gaudy colours which faded towards the middle-a sort of oasis in which grew a tree. Fabu

lous looking animals and creatures with wings sprawled around its margins. After repeated attempts I found to my disappointment that your only way out of the oasis and the maze was, after long groping, by the way you went in. Underneath it was written "This is the key." And above it in green letters stood this:-Behold upon the mountains the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace!

It was unfortunate that so little more of daylight was now left dying in the sky that evening; for as yet I had not the confidence to kindle the wax candles that stood in their brass sticks in the round tower. It was high time for me to be getting home. In my haste to be off I nearly collided with Miss Taroone, who happened to be standing in the dusklight looking out from under her. porch. Too much excited even to beg her pardon, I blurted out: "Miss Taroone, I have found out what the pictures are of. It's a Book. Theeothaworldie. Mr. Nahum's portrait's in it, but they've put wings to him; and it's all in his writing-rhymes."

She looked down at me, though I could not quite see her face.

"Then, good-night to you, Simon; and happy dreams," she said, in her unfriendly voice.

"I like the round room better and better," I replied as heartily as I could. "That picture of Mr. Nahum— and there are lots more, I think—is a little bit like an uncle of mine who died in Russia; my Uncle John."

"John's as good a name, I suppose, as any other, Simon," said Miss Taroone. She stood looking out on the dusky country scene. "There's a heavy dew tonight, and the owls are busy."

They were indeed. Their screechings sounded on all sides of me as I ran off homewards, chanting over to myself the words that had somehow stuck in my mem

ory.