tell stories
about foreign lands while they were distilling the pure mercury, or
performing other innocent operations suggested by the board,
enlightening them on various subjects where he felt their ignorance to
be equal to his own. "My letters home contained descriptions and
sketches of them, and my mamma became interested in their spiritual
welfare." Surrounded by the halo of memory, they afterwards seemed to
him primitive gentlemen worthy of King Arthur's Round Table. He
describes existence between the hours of work as full of charm owing to
the friendship of surrounding farmers and small gentry. In a "Trilby"
way he describes how he "rode, and wrestled, and boxed with them! and
fell in love with their sisters, and sketched them, and sang Tyrolese
melodies to them, ... blessing the lucky stroke of fortune which had
made him mining engineer to a gold mine without any gold, and managed by
gentlemen who obstinately persisted in ignoring the latter important
fact, in spite of his honest endeavours to persuade them of it." "I
have," he says, "only to hum a certain 'jodel' chorus, and the whole
scene returns to me, surrounded by that peculiar fascination which
belongs to past pleasures--a phenomenon far more interesting to me than
the most marvellous phenomenon of science."

Every artist is an experimental psychologist, the material for his art
is really always some mental experience. He wishes to communicate with
his public in the spirit of this experience. With Scott it was the old
associations of places, with du Maurier the associations of "old times,"
of personal memory. This was the frame of mind the interpretation of
which absorbed him in his literary art, distinguishing it, except in
his early _Cornhill_ work, from his art with the pencil.

There is not much in the remaining part of the gold-mine narrative which
can be shown to bear upon the artist's career. The conclusion of the
story shows his forfeiture of the regard of the directors by openness of
speech to the shareholders as to the proceedings at the mine.

Such was his experience of a mine in Devonshire and of relationship with
the miners, who, with the limited experience of the mining classes in
those days, had some difficulty in "placing" du Maurier with his, to
them, unusual physical delicacy and yet more unusual personal charm.

Section 4

The literary gift in the above narration will, we think, be evident even
in our quotations. But during the g