Permit me to offer you my sincere thanks for the very sweet verses you have written about my dream-child (named after a real Alice, but none the less a dream-child) and her Wonderland.  That children love the book is a very precious thought to me, and, next to their love, I value the sympathy of those who come with a child’s heart to what I have tried to write about a child’s thoughts.  Next to what conversing with an angel might be—­for it is hard to imagine it—­comes, I think, the privilege of having a real child’s thoughts uttered to one.  I have known some few real children (you have too, I am sure), and their friendship is a blessing and a help in life.

[Illustration:  Alice Liddell. From a photograph by Lewis Carroll.]

It is interesting to note how in “Sylvie and Bruno” his idea of the thoughts of a child has become deeper and more spiritual.  Yet in the earlier tale, told “all in a golden afternoon,” to the plash of oars and the swish of a boat through the waters of Cherwell or Thames, the ideal child is strangely beautiful; she has all Sylvie’s genuineness and honesty, all her keen appreciation of the interest of life; only there lacks that mysterious charm of deep insight into the hidden forces of nature, the gentle power that makes the sky “such a darling blue,” which almost links Sylvie with the angels.

Another of Lewis Carroll’s early favourites was Miss Alexandra (Xie) Kitchin, daughter of the Dean of Durham.  Her father was for fifteen years the Censor of the unattached members of the University of Oxford, so that Mr. Dodgson had plenty of opportunities of photographing his little friend, and it is only fair to him to say that he did not neglect them.

It would be futile to attempt even a bare list of the children whom he loved, and who loved him; during forty years of his life he was constantly adding to their number.  Some remained friends for life, but in a large proportion of cases the friendship ended with the end of childhood.  To one of those few, whose affection for him had not waned with increasing years, he wrote:—­

I always feel specially grateful to friends who, like you, have given me a child-friendship and a woman-friendship.  About nine out of ten, I think, of my child-friendships get ship-wrecked at the critical point, “where the stream and river meet,” and the child-friends, once so affectionate, become uninteresting acquaintances, whom I have no wish to set eyes on again.

[Illustration:  Xie Kitchin. From a photograph by Lewis Carroll.]