It is getting increasingly difficult now to remember which of one’s friends remain alive, and which have gone “into the land of the great departed, into the silent land.”  Also, such news comes less and less as a shock, and more and more one realises that it is an experience each of us has to face before long.  That fact is getting less dreamlike to me now, and I sometimes think what a grand thing it will be to be able to say to oneself, “Death is over now; there is not that experience to be faced again.”

I am beginning to think that, if the books I am still hoping to write are to be done at all, they must be done now, and that I am meant thus to utilise the splendid health I have had, unbroken, for the last year and a half, and the working powers that are fully as great as, if not greater, than I have ever had.  I brought with me here (this letter was written from Eastbourne) the MS., such as it is (very fragmentary and unarranged) for the book about religious difficulties, and I meant, when I came here, to devote myself to that, but I have changed my plan.  It seems to me that that subject is one that hundreds of living men could do, if they would only try, much better than I could, whereas there is no living man who could (or at any rate who would take the trouble to) arrange and finish and publish the second part of the “Logic.”  Also, I have the Logic book in my head; it will only need three or four months to write out, and I have not got the other book in my head, and it might take years to think out.  So I have decided to get Part ii. finished first, and I am working at it day and night.  I have taken to early rising, and sometimes sit down to my work before seven, and have one and a half hours at it before breakfast.  The book will be a great novelty, and will help, I fully believe, to make the study of Logic far easier than it now is.  And it will, I also believe, be a help to religious thought by giving clearness of conception and of expression, which may enable many people to face, and conquer, many religious difficulties for themselves.  So I do really regard it as work for God.

Another letter, written a few months later to Miss Dora Abdy, deals with the subject of “Reverence,” which Mr. Dodgson considered a virtue not held in sufficient esteem nowadays:—­

My Dear Dora,—­In correcting the proofs of “Through the Looking-Glass” (which is to have “An Easter Greeting” inserted at the end), I am reminded that in that letter (I enclose a copy), I had tried to express my thoughts on the very subject we talked about last night—­the relation of laughter to religious thought.  One of the hardest things in the world is to convey a meaning accurately from one mind to another, but the sort of meaning I want to convey to other minds is