and possessed of an opal for a heart. Behind the artist there is the woman, and behind the woman there is—well, it is only fair to say at the outset that Michael Wood is a religieuse, and allow opportunity for those canny readers to run, who object to the word God. For Michael Wood is a mystic of mystics, a High Church mystic, I think, although once I thought her a theosophist, and, more than once, a Roman Catholic. Indeed, she is something of all three; and there is an occult beauty about some of her passages, which, ordinarily and easily, we speak of as pagan. It is dangerous too closely to connect an author and his work, and one hesitates to suggest that the extraordinary experiences recited in Michael Wood's stories have been her own; but for the fact that they are founded on experience we have her own assurance. Almost without exception, they are studies of the conflicting powers of good and evil, visible and invisible, as they affect the lives of her various characters; and they offer a solution to certain obstinate questionings which, try as we may, refuse to be stilled.
The sense of the invisible, the intimate understanding of what Arthur Machen calls, simply, "the other things," are here for those who have what the French describe as the "seeing ear and the hearing eye," and to those who understand the
