So you have been for twelve years a married man, while I am still a lonely old bachelor!  And mean to keep so, for the matter of that.  College life is by no means unmixed misery, though married life has no doubt many charms to which I am a stranger.

A note in his Diary on May 5th shows one of the changes in his way of life which advancing years forced him to make:—­

Wrote to —­ (who had invited me to dine) to beg off, on the ground that, in my old age, I find dinner parties more and more fatiguing.  This is quite a new departure.  I much grudge giving an evening (even if it were not tiring) to bandying small-talk with dull people.

The next extract I give does not look much like old age!

I called on Mrs. M—.  She was out; and only one maid in, who, having come to the gate to answer the bell, found the door blown shut on her return.  The poor thing seemed really alarmed and distressed.  However, I got a man to come from a neighbouring yard with a ladder, and got in at the drawing-room window—­a novel way of entering a friend’s house!

Oddly enough, almost exactly the same thing happened to him in 1888:  “The door blew shut, with the maid outside, and no one in the house.  I got the cook of the next house to let me go through their premises, and with the help of a pair of steps got over the wall between the two back-yards.”

In July there appeared an article in the St. James’s Gazette on the subject of “Parliamentary Elections,” written by Mr. Dodgson.  It was a subject in which he was much interested, and a few years before he had contributed a long letter on the “Purity of Elections” to the same newspaper.  I wish I had space to give both in full; as things are, a summary and a few extracts are all I dare attempt.  The writer held that there are a great number of voters, and pari passu a great number of constituencies, that like to be on the winning side, and whose votes are chiefly influenced by that consideration.  The ballot-box has made it practically impossible for the individual voter to know which is going to be the winning side, but after the first few days of a general election, one side or the other has generally got a more or less decided advantage, and a weak-kneed constituency is sorely tempted to swell the tide of victory.

But this is not all.  The evil extends further than to the single constituency; nay, it extends further than to a single general election; it constitutes a feature in our national history; it is darkly ominous for the future of England.  So long as general elections are conducted as at present we shall be liable to oscillations of political power, like those of 1874 and 1880, but of ever-increasing violence—­one Parliament wholly at the mercy of one political party, the next wholly at the mercy of the other—­while the Government of the hour, joyfully hastening to undo all that its predecessors have done, will wield