When we joined our friends we found Van Lerius and Heyermans had been pressed into the service, and were making sketches for my sister’s album.  Du Maurier took up a pencil, and, with a few characteristic touches, drew that sister’s eyes.  “Quand je les vois,” he wrote underneath, “j’oublie les miens. (Reflexion d’un futur aveugle.) When I see them I forget my own. (Reflections of a man going blind.)”

Soon the main business of the evening was resumed.  Was it Beethoven’s sonata for piano and violin, or a mighty improvisation on classical themes that came first?  I do not recollect; but I remember that du Maurier’s rendering of Balfe’s “When other lips and other hearts,” with my scratch accompaniment, was warmly greeted by all lips and hearts present.

When these pleasant evenings had come to an end, the friendly intercourse was not allowed to drop, and so a number of sketches by her new friends found their way into Miss Clara’s album.

In the following winter, when I left on a short visit to Leipsic, he sent her a few lines through me.  I quote from his letter because the wording is peculiar, and illustrates his capacity for expressing himself in a language that he had to evolve from his inner consciousness:—­

“Herr Rag schickt zu Fraeulein Moscheles sein empfehlung und ihren bruder; es wird hoeflicht gebeten das sie wird die sach reciprokiren, und in fuenftzen daegen ihr empfehlung und seinen freund zuruck schicken.”

For the benefit of those whose inner consciousness is not in touch with the above, I give the English version:—­

“Mr. Rag sends his greeting and her brother to Miss Moscheles, and kindly requests her to reciprocate the proceeding in a fortnight by returning her greeting and his friend.”

[Illustration:  “HERR RAG SCHICKT ZU FRAeULEIN MOSCHELES SEIN EMPFEHLUNG UND IHREN BRUDER.”]

[Illustration:  LIX.]

When I think how easily and spontaneously such sketches dropped from his pen, I am reminded of a passage in one of Mendelssohn’s letters to my mother; he sends her the Mailied and says:  “This morning a song came to me.  I really must write it down for you.”  So, too, from the first the pen-and-ink compositions came to du Maurier.  His talent manifested itself not only in a desire to illustrate this or that incident or adventure, but also in his inexhaustible capacity for making something out of nothing, and as the nothing was never lacking, he might well say:  “Dear Bobtail, I will never write without sending my compliments to thine album.”  His rendering of “Cher Lix,” for instance, takes the shape of a graceful monogram, or diplogram, or whatever I ought to call a combination of our two profiles and my name.

[Illustration]

He starts a short missive with a sketch of himself seated in his trunk, pipe in mouth, and says:  “Dear Bobtail, I write to you out of sheer idleness, so as to have an excuse not to pack up for the next half-hour.”  Or he draws himself looking over my shoulder whilst I am writing to my sister and puts the supposed context of my letter:—­