A if Mr. .. : had been asked e instead ots back, he would ben able to lud his pencil.” This ved the at quaintance thus begun bania Ajendship, which knew no „rect-hearted novelist passed there years later. Thackeray's 1. Walker came running to heard of her father's death, net wandering about the

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is not necessary. Suffice it to say that by 1865, when he had reached his twenty-fifth year, he had already won enviable repute for his artistic skill. At this crisis some happy chance led to his taking a cottage at Cookham, as a summer home for himself and his devoted mother and sister and brother. That modest dwelling stands in the main street of the village, about midway between the railway station and the Thames. Perhaps it is hardly the kind of dwelling an artist would have been expected to choose, for its flint-built walls and ungainly height are far from picturesque. Hither, however, for the remaining ten years of his life, Walker frequently came, thus building up for this homely cottage a wealth of association which many a more stately home

must envy.

But if his cottage home at Cookham was not beautiful, the village itself, and other near-by hamlets, and the surrounding fields, and the "silver-streaming" Thames were replete with incipient pictures. The painter's mother realized that fact. "This is a very lovely place," she wrote soon after reaching the village. "Fred would be delighted; and for a summer picture of boys bathing, there cannot be its equal, at least in my experience." Such was to be the