so charmingly as du Maurier tells it. We could quote endlessly from the
admirably constructed nursery dialogues in which he does not attempt to
make a joke, and in which he very carefully refrains from giving a
fantastic precocity to his little characters--dialogues in which he is
quite content to rely upon our sympathetic knowledge of children's way
of putting things, while he rests the appeal of the drawing and legend
entirely upon a _naïve_ literalness to their remarks. The charming
atmosphere of the well-ordered nursery must be felt by readers, and then
we can quote from the text of some of his drawings of the kind; this we
shall do somewhat at random and as they come to mind.

"Are you asleep, dearest? Yes, Mamma, and the Doctor particularly
said that I wasn't to be waked to take my medicine" (_July_ 10,
1880).

"Oh, Auntie! There's your tiresome cook's been and filled my egg
too full" (_April_ 22, 1882).

Already we are seized with misgivings as to whether, with the reader
very much on the look-out for the jokes, we shall be successful in
making our point in claiming for du Maurier that, as much as any author
who has ever written upon children, he captures "the note" of children's
speeches. But anyhow we will try.

For an instance there is the delightful picture of a child clasping its
mother round the knees, whilst the mother, shawled for an evening
concert, bends affectionately down--

"Good Night! Good Night! my dear, sweet, pretty mamma! I like you
to go out, because if you didn't you'd never come home again, you