be obtained from Edith Sichel's _Life and
Letters of Alfred Ainger_.[5]

"For fifteen years," says Miss Sichel, "they always met once, and
generally twice a day. Hampstead knew their figures as every afternoon
they walked round the pond on the Heath, deep in conversation. Edward
Fitzgerald himself never had a closer friendship than had these two men
for one another. Their mental climates suited; they were akin, yet had
strong differences. Perhaps in the quickness of their mutual attraction
Frenchman recognised Frenchman. But Ainger was the French Huguenot and
du Maurier the French sceptic. Both had mercurial perceptions, and
exercised them on much the same objects. Both were wits and humorists,
but Ainger was more of a wit than a humorist, and du Maurier was more of
a humorist than a wit. Both were men of fancy rather than of
imagination, men of sentiment rather than of passion. Both, too, were
fantastics; both loved what was beautiful and graceful rather than
what was grand; but du Maurier was more of the pure artist, while to
Ainger the moral side of beauty most appealed.... Both men were gifted
with an exquisite kindness.... Du Maurier was the keener and clearer
thinker of the two; he had the wider outlook and the fewer prejudices."
Their closest bond was _Punch_, which was to Ainger a delight from cover
to cover.

[Illustration: Canon Ainger

Portrait in water-colour by du Maurier. In the possession of the
artist's widow.]

The artist's love of Whitby is well known; he expressed it himself in
his _Punch_ drawings over and over again. He wrote to Ainger in 1891:
"It is delightful to get a letter from you at Whitby--the place we all
like best in the world." He gives a list of places and things to be
especially seen there, among them the cottage of Sylvia Robson of
_Sylvia's Lovers_, and No 1 St. Hilda's Terrace, "the humble but
singularly charming little house where your friends have dwelt, and
would fain dwell again (and two of them end their days there, somewhere
towards the middle of the twentieth century)."

It was at Whitby when Ainger and his nieces were there with the du
Mauriers that they were once delighted by seeing "Trilby Drops"
advertised in a little village sweet-shop. "Such is fame," said du
Maurier, but when his daughter went in to ask about the "drops," the
girl behind the counter had no idea what "Trilby" meant.

In the summer numbers of past volumes of _Punch_ Whitby has figured in
the backg