will wonder why I ask you to tell him instead of writing myself.  The obvious reason is that you will be able, from sympathy, to put my delay in the most favorable light—­to make him see that, as hasty puddings are not the best of puddings so hasty judgments are not the best of judgments, and that he ought to be content to wait even another seven years for his picture, and to sit ‘like patience on a monument, smiling at grief.’  This quotation, by the way, is altogether a misprint.  Let me explain it to you.  The passage originally stood, ’They sit like patients on the Monument, smiling at Greenwich.’  In the next edition ‘Greenwich’ was printed short, ‘Green’h,’ and so got gradually altered into ‘grief.’  The allusion of course is to the celebrated Dr. Jenner, who used to send all his patients to sit on the top of the Monument (near London Bridge) to inhale fresh air, promising them that, when they were well enough, they should go to ‘Greenwich Fair.’  So of course they always looked out towards Greenwich, and sat smiling to think of the treat in store for them.  A play was written on the subject of their inhaling the fresh air, and was for some time attributed to him (Shakespeare), but it is certainly not in his style.  It was called ‘The Wandering Air,’ and was lately revived at the Queen’s Theater.  The custom of sitting on the Monument was given up when Dr. Jenner went mad, and insisted on it that the air was worse up there and that the lower you went the more airy it became.  Hence he always called those little yards, below the pavement, outside the kitchen windows, ‘the kitchen airier,’ a name that is still in use.

“All this information you are most welcome to use, the next time you are in want of something to talk about.  You may say you learned it from ’a distinguished etymologist,’ which is perfectly true, since any one who knows me by sight can easily distinguish me from all other etymologists.

“What parts are you and Polly now playing?

“Believe me to be (conventionally)

“Yours affectionately,

“L.  DODGSON.”

No two men could be more unlike than Mr. Dodgson and Mr. J.M.  Barrie, yet there are more points of resemblance than “because there’s a ‘b’ in both!”

If “Alice in Wonderland” is the children’s classic of the library, and one perhaps even more loved by the grown up children than by the others, “Peter Pan” is the children’s stage classic, and here again elderly children are the most devoted admirers.  I am a very old child, nearly old enough to be a “beautiful great-grandmother” (a part that I have entreated Mr. Barrie to write for me), and I go and see “Peter” year after year and love him more each time.  There is one advantage in being a grown-up child—­you are not afraid of the pirates or the crocodile.

I first became an ardent lover of Mr. Barrie through “Sentimental Tommy,” and I simply had to write and tell him how hugely I had enjoyed it.  In reply I had a letter from Tommy himself!