We are sufficiently old friends, I feel sure, for me to have no fear that I shall seem intrusive in writing about your great sorrow.  The greatest blow that has ever fallen on my life was the death, nearly thirty years ago, of my own dear father; so, in offering you my sincere sympathy, I write as a fellow-sufferer.  And I rejoice to know that we are not only fellow-sufferers, but also fellow-believers in the blessed hope of the resurrection from the dead, which makes such a parting holy and beautiful, instead of being merely a blank despair.

The second was written to a young friend, Miss Edith Rix, who had sent him an illuminated text: 

My dear Edith,—­I can now tell you (what I wanted to do when you sent me that text-card, but felt I could not say it to two listeners, as it were) why that special card is one I like to have.  That text is consecrated for me by the memory of one of the greatest sorrows I have known—­the death of my dear father.  In those solemn days, when we used to steal, one by one, into the darkened room, to take yet another look at the dear calm face, and to pray for strength, the one feature in the room that I remember was a framed text, illuminated by one of my sisters, “Then are they glad, because they are at rest; and so he bringeth them into the haven where they would be!” That text will always have, for me, a sadness and a sweetness of its own.  Thank you again for sending it me.  Please don’t mention this when we meet.  I can’t talk about it.

    Always affectionately yours,

    C. L. DODGSON.

The object of his edition of Euclid Book V., published during the course of the year, was to meet the requirements of the ordinary Pass Examination, and to present the subject in as short and simple a form as possible.  Hence the Theory of Incommensurable Magnitudes was omitted, though, as the author himself said in the Preface, to do so rendered the work incomplete, and, from a logical point of view, valueless.  He hinted pretty plainly his own preference for an equivalent amount of Algebra, which would be complete in itself.  It is easy to understand this preference in a mind so strictly logical as his.

So far as the object of the book itself is concerned, he succeeded admirably; the propositions are clearly and beautifully worked out, and the hints on proving Propositions in Euclid Book V., are most useful.

In November he again moved into new rooms at Christ Church; the suite which he occupied from this date to the end of his life was one of the best in the College.  Situated at the north-west corner of Tom Quad, on the first floor of the staircase from the entrance to which the Junior Common Room is now approached, they consist of four sitting-rooms and about an equal number of bedrooms, besides rooms for lumber, &c.  From the upper floor one can easily reach the flat college roof.  Mr. Dodgson saw at once that here was the very place for a photographic studio, and he lost no time in obtaining the consent of the authorities to erect one.  Here he took innumerable photographs of his friends and their children, as indeed he had been doing for some time under less favourable conditions.  One of his earliest pictures is an excellent likeness of Professor Faraday.