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.”
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration]
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.”