pass when persons were found to
talk of "_living up_--to a Tea-pot." At this juncture the jest seemed
ripe for treatment, and du Maurier thereupon produced his famous drawing
of the aesthetic bride and bridegroom comparing notes over the precious
piece of crockery in question: "Oh! Algernon! Let us live up to it!"

Speaking of fifteen years of constant companionship in walks upon the
Heath, the Canon says no one could have had a better opportunity of
tasting the unfailing charm of du Maurier's conversation, the width of
his reading and observation, and his inexhaustible fund of anecdote. In
these conversations Canon Ainger heard every detail of his companion's
school life, his studio-life in Paris, which afterwards found a place in
the pages of his three novels.

Referring to the long years of uninterrupted achievement of the artist's
life at Hampstead, "only once," says his friend, "in all the years I
knew him was he forced to lay his pencil by for a season. His solitary
eye had temporarily failed him, but, with spirits unsubdued, he promptly
took up the art of lecturer with marked success, although from the first
it was against the grain. When, however, after an interval his sight
returned to him, and the literary instinct, encouraged doubtless by the
success of his lectures, began to quicken, he gained, we all know,
though then past fifty years of age, a new public and a new career in
writing fiction." "Except," proceeds Canon Ainger, "to his intimate
friends and to his colleagues on _Punch_ the display of this gift was an
absolute surprise.... He wrote with extraordinary and even dangerous
facility. It is fair, however, to add that his best passages were often
produced as rapidly as all the rest. For instance, the scene in _Trilby_
when the mother and uncle of Little Billee arrive in Paris, hearing of
the engagement, and have their first interview with Taffy, was written
straight off one evening between dinner and bed-time." This scene, in
the judgment of Ainger, represents du Maurier at his high-water mark as
a novelist and as a worthy follower of the great master on whom his
style was undoubtedly based.

"Hampstead," continues the Canon, "was a real foster-mother to George du
Maurier, not only in what it brought him but in what it saved him from.
He was by nature and by practice one of the most generous and hospitable
of men. He loved to entertain his friends from town, and to take them
afterwards his favourite