to hear that you are getting on so well with your Latin, and that you make so few mistakes in your Exercises.  You will be happy to hear that your dearest Grandpapa is going on nicely—­indeed I hope he will soon be quite well again.  He talks a great deal and most kindly about you all.  I hope my sweetest Will says “Mama” sometimes, and that precious Tish has not forgotten.  Give them and all my other treasures, including yourself, 1,000,000,000 kisses from me, with my most affectionate love.  I am sending you a shabby note, but I cannot help it.  Give my kindest love to Aunt Dar, and believe me, my own dearest Charlie, to be your sincerely affectionate

    Mama.

Among the few visitors who disturbed the repose of Daresbury Parsonage was Mr. Durnford, afterwards Bishop of Chichester, with whom Mr. Dodgson had formed a close friendship.  Another was Mr. Bayne, at that time head-master of Warrington Grammar School, who used occasionally to assist in the services at Daresbury.  His son, Vere, was Charles’s playfellow; he is now a student of Christ Church, and the friendship between him and Lewis Carroll lasted without interruption till the death of the latter.

The memory of his birthplace did not soon fade from Charles’s mind; long afterwards he retained pleasant recollections of its rustic beauty.  For instance, his poem of “The Three Sunsets,” which first appeared in 1860 in All the Year Round, begins with the following stanzas, which have been slightly altered in later editions:—­

        I watch the drowsy night expire,
        And Fancy paints at my desire
        Her magic pictures in the fire.

        An island farm, ’mid seas of corn,
        Swayed by the wandering breath of morn,
        The happy spot where I was born.

Though nearly all Mr. Dodgson’s parishioners at Daresbury have passed away, yet there are still some few left who speak with loving reverence of him whose lips, now long silenced, used to speak so kindly to them; whose hands, long folded in sleep, were once so ready to alleviate their wants and sorrows.

In 1843 Sir Robert Peel presented him to the Crown living of Croft, a Yorkshire village about three miles south of Darlington.  This preferment made a great change in the life of the family; it opened for them many more social opportunities, and put an end to that life of seclusion which, however beneficial it may be for a short time, is apt, if continued too long, to have a cramping and narrowing influence.

The river Tees is at Croft the dividing line between Yorkshire and Durham, and on the middle of the bridge which there crosses it is a stone which shows where the one county ends and the other begins.  “Certain lands are held in this place,” says Lewis in his “Topographical Dictionary,” “by the owner presenting on the bridge, at the coming of every new Bishop of Durham, an old sword, pronouncing a legendary address, and delivering the sword to the Bishop, who returns it immediately.”  The Tees is subject to extraordinary floods, and though Croft Church stands many feet above the ordinary level of the river, and is separated from it by the churchyard and a field, yet on one occasion the church itself was flooded, as was attested by water-marks on the old woodwork several feet from the floor, still to be seen when Mr. Dodgson was incumbent.