“Now I’m going to put before you a ‘Hero-ic’ puzzle of mine, but please remember I do not ask for your solution of it, as you will persist in believing, if I ask your help in a Shakespeare difficulty, that I am only jesting!  However, if you won’t attack it yourself, perhaps you would ask Mr. Irving some day how he explains it?

“My difficulty is this:—­Why in the world did not Hero (or at any rate Beatrice on her behalf) prove an ‘alibi’ in answer to the charge?  It seems certain that she did not sleep in her room that night; for how could Margaret venture to open the window and talk from it, with her mistress asleep in the room?  It would be sure to wake her.  Besides Borachio says, after promising that Margaret shall speak with him out of Hero’s chamber window, ’I will so fashion the matter that Hero shall be absent.’ (How he could possibly manage any such thing is another difficulty, but I pass over that.) Well then, granting that Hero slept in some other room that night, why didn’t she say so?  When Claudio asks her:  ’What man was he talked with yesternight out at your window betwixt twelve and one?’ why doesn’t she reply:  ’I talked with no man at that hour, my lord.  Nor was I in my chamber yesternight, but in another, far from it, remote.’  And this she could, of course, prove by the evidence of the housemaids, who must have known that she had occupied another room that night.

“But even if Hero might be supposed to be so distracted as not to remember where she had slept the night before, or even whether she had slept anywhere, surely Beatrice has her wits about her!  And when an arrangement was made, by which she was to lose, for one night, her twelve-months’ bedfellow, is it conceivable that she didn’t know where Hero passed the night?  Why didn’t she reply: 

    “But good my lord sweet Hero slept not there: 
    She had another chamber for the nonce. 
    ’Twas sure some counterfeit that did present
    Her person at the window, aped her voice,
    Her mien, her manners, and hath thus deceived
    My good Lord Pedro and this company?’

     “With all these excellent materials for proving an ‘alibi’ it is
     incomprehensible that no one should think of it.  If only there had
     been a barrister present, to cross-examine Beatrice!

“’Now, ma’am, attend to me, please, and speak up so that the jury can hear you.  Where did you sleep last night?  Where did Hero sleep?  Will you swear that she slept in her own room?  Will you swear that you do not know where she slept?’ I feel inclined to quote old Mr. Weller and to say to Beatrice at the end of the play (only I’m afraid it isn’t etiquette to speak across the footlights): 

     “‘Oh, Samivel, Samivel, vy vornt there a halibi?’”

Mr. Dodgson’s kindness to children was wonderful.  He really loved them and put himself out for them.  The children he knew who wanted to go on the stage were those who came under my observation, and nothing could have been more touching than his ceaseless industry on their behalf.