Presently the maid returned—­

    “He says he is Mr. Dodgson, of Oxford.”

    “Lewis Carroll!” I exclaimed; and somebody else had to
    superintend the cooking that day.

My apologies were soon made and cheerfully accepted.  I believe I was unconventional enough to tell the exact truth concerning my occupation, and matters were soon on a friendly footing.  Indeed I may say at once that the stately college don we have heard so much about never made his appearance during our intercourse with him.

    He did not talk “Alice,” of course; authors don’t generally
    talk their books, I imagine; but it was undoubtedly
    Lewis Carroll who was present with us.

A portrait of Ellen Terry on the wall had attracted his attention, and one of the first questions he asked was, “Do you ever go to the theatre?” I explained that such things were done, occasionally, even among Quakers, but they were not considered quite orthodox.

“Oh, well, then you will not be shocked, and I may venture to produce my photographs.”  And out into the hall he went, and soon returned with a little black bag containing character portraits of his child-friends, Isa and Nellie Bowman.

    “Isa used to be Alice until she grew too big,” he said. 
    “Nellie was one of the oyster-fairies, and Emsie, the tiny
    one of all, was the Dormouse.”

“When ‘Alice’ was first dramatised,” he said, “the poem of the ‘Walrus and the Carpenter’ fell rather flat, for people did not know when it was finished, and did not clap in the right place; so I had to write a song for the ghosts of the oysters to sing, which made it all right.”

[Illustration:  Alice and the Dormouse. From a photograph by Elliott & Fry.]

    He was then on his way to London, to fetch Isa to stay with
    him at Eastbourne.  She was evidently a great favourite, and
    had visited him before.  Of that earlier time he said:—­

“When people ask me why I have never married, I tell them I have never met the young lady whom I could endure for a fortnight—­but Isa and I got on so well together that I said I should keep her a month, the length of the honeymoon, and we didn’t get tired of each other.”

Nellie afterwards joined her sister “for a few days,” but the days spread to some weeks, for the poor little dormouse developed scarlet fever, and the elder children had to be kept out of harm’s way until fear of infection was over.

Of Emsie he had a funny little story to tell.  He had taken her to the Aquarium, and they had been watching the seals coming up dripping out of the water.  With a very pitiful look she turned to him and said, “Don’t they give them any towels?” [The same little girl commiserated the bear, because it had got no tail.]