The principal anecdote on this occasion was about a dog which had been sent into the sea after sticks.  He brought them back very properly for some time, and then there appeared to be a little difficulty, and he returned swimming in a very curious manner.  On closer inspection it appeared that he had caught hold of his own tail by mistake, and was bringing it to land in triumph.

This was told with the utmost gravity, and though we had been requested beforehand not to mention “Lewis Carroll’s” books, the temptation was too strong.  I could not help saying to the child next me—­

    “That was like the Whiting, wasn’t it?”

    Our visitor, however, took up the remark, and seemed quite
    willing to talk about it.

“When I wrote that,” he said, “I believed that whiting really did have their tails in their mouths, but I have since been told that fishmongers put the tail through the eye, not in the mouth at all.”

He was not a very good carver, for Miss Bremer also describes a little difficulty he had—­this time with the pastry:  “An amusing incident occurred when he was at lunch with us.  He was requested to serve some pastry, and, using a knife, as it was evidently rather hard, the knife penetrated the d’oyley beneath—­and his consternation was extreme when he saw the slice of linen and lace he served as an addition to the tart!”

It was, I think, through her connection with the “Alice” play that Mr. Dodgson first came to know Miss Isa Bowman.  Her childish friendship for him was one of the joys of his later years, and one of the last letters he wrote was addressed to her.  The poem at the beginning of “Sylvie and Bruno” is an acrostic on her name—­

        Is all our Life, then, but a dream,
        Seen faintly in the golden gleam
        Athwart Times’s dark, resistless stream?

        Bowed to the earth with bitter woe,
        Or laughing at some raree-show,
        We flutter idly to and fro.

        Man’s little Day in haste we spend,
        And, from the merry noontide, send
        No glance to meet the silent end.

Every one has heard of Lewis Carroll’s hatred of interviewers; the following letter to Miss Manners makes one feel that in some cases, at least, his feeling was justifiable:—­

If your Manchester relatives ever go to the play, tell them they ought to see Isa as “Cinderella”—­she is evidently a success.  And she has actually been “interviewed” by one of those dreadful newspapers reporters, and the “interview” is published with her picture!  And such rubbish he makes her talk!  She tells him that something or other was “tacitly conceded”:  and that “I love to see a great actress give expression to the wonderful ideas of the immortal master!”

    (N.B.—­I never let her talk like that when she is with me!)