RHYMED CORRESPONDENCE[23]
Dear Maggie.—I found that the friend, that the little girl asked me to write to, lived at Ripon, and not at Land’s End—a nice sort of place to invite to! It looked rather suspicious to me—and soon after, by dint of incessant inquiries, I found out that she was called Maggie, and lived in a Crescent! Of course I declared, “After that” (the language I used doesn’t matter), “I will not address her, that’s flat! So do not expect me to flatter.”
No carte has yet been done of me, that does real justice to my smile; and so I hardly like, you see, to send you one. However, I’ll consider if I will or not—meanwhile, I send a little thing to give you an idea of what I look like when I’m lecturing. The merest sketch, you will allow—yet still I think there’s something grand in the expression of the brow and in the action of the hand.
Have you read my fairy-tale in “Aunt Judy’s Magazine”? If you have you will not fail to discover what I mean when I say, “Bruno yesterday came to remind me that he was my godson!”—on the ground that I “gave him a name”!
[23] From a letter written to Miss Maggie Cunningham in 1868. The fairy-tale referred to was “Bruno’s Revenge,” which, more than twenty years later, Lewis Carroll developed into “Sylvie and Bruno.”