aggie?"

_Maggie_. "I don't know."

_Mamma_. "And what are you looking so indignant about?"

_Maggie_. "That nasty, greedy dog's been and took and eaten my
punge-take!"

_Mamma_. "Why, I saw you eating a sponge-cake a minute ago!"

_Maggie_. "O--that was Baby's."

We need hardly labour the point of the "been and took and eaten" as an
instance of felicity in reconstructing children's conversation, and
making the verisimilitude to their grammar the charm of the
reconstruction.

_Ethel_. "Isn't it sad, Arthur? There's the drawing-room cleared
for a dance, and all the dolls ready to begin, only they've got no
partners!"

_Arthur_. "Well, Ethel! There's the four gentlemen in my Noah's
Ark; but they don't look as if they cared very much about
_dancing_, you know!" (_February_ 24, 1872).

_Ethel_. "And O, Mamma, do you know as we were coming along we saw
a horrid woman with a red striped shawl drink something out of a
bottle, and then hand it to some men. I'm sure she was tipsy."

_Beatrice_ (who always looks on the best side of things). "Perhaps
it was only Castor Oil, after all!"

_A whispered appeal_. "Mamma! Mamma! don't scold him any more, it
makes the room so dark."

It is the _poetry_ of the nursery that is to be felt throughout du
Maurier's art in this vein. And how well he knows the emotions of
childhood. For instance, the large drawing "Farewell to Fair Normandy"
(October 2, 1880), extending across two full pages of _Punch_, in which
the children away for their seaside holiday leave the sands for the last
time in a mournful procession. The sky is dimmed with an evening cloud.
Du Maurier has compressed much poetry into the scene. It has been said
that "there is only one art," and this seems to be proved on great
occasions by those who can command more than one art for the expression
of their feelings. It is difficult to say where in this picture the
artist in du Maurier gives place to the poet, as difficult as it is to
say before a picture of Rossetti.

[Illustration: Illustration for "Wives and Daughters"

_The Cornhill_, 1865.]

Sometimes du Maurier even depicted delightful children as the victims of
the fashionable crazes that he loved to attack, and thus we are brought
to another series of dialogues--as a rule though only involving the
"grown-ups"--in which the legend and the type of person depicted,