difficulty was increased by the fact that the fairy child Sylvie and the
Society grown-up Lady Muriel were one and the same person! So I received
reams of written descriptions and piles of useless photographs intended
to inspire me to draw with a few lines a face embodying his ideal in a
space not larger than a threepenny-piece. By one post I would receive a
batch of photographs of some young lady Lewis Carroll fancied had one
feature, or half a feature, of that ideal he had conjured up in his own
mind as his heroine.

[Illustration: LEWIS CARROLL'S NOTE TO ME FOR A PATHETIC PICTURE.]

He invited me to visit friends of his, and strangers too, from John o'
Groats to Land's End, so as to collect fragments of faces. _A propos_ of
this I wrote in an artists' magazine a brief account of artists'
difficulties with the too exacting author. (It is quite safe to write
anything about Judges and Dons: they never read anything.) I described
how I received the author's recipe for constructing the ideal heroine. I
am not to take _one_ model for the lady-child or child-lady. I am to
take _several_; for all know no face--at least, no face with expression,
or with plenty of life or good abilities, or when showing depth of
religious thought--is perfect. I am therefore to go to Eastbourne to see
and study the face of Miss Matilda Smith, in a pastry-cook's shop, for
the eyes. I am to visit Eastbourne and eat buns and cakes, gazing the
while into the beauteous eyes of Miss Smith. Then in Glasgow there is a
Miss O'Grady, "with oh, such a perfect nose! Could I run up to Scotland
to make a sketch of it?" A letter of introduction is enclosed, and, as a
precaution, I am enjoined that I "must not mind her squint." But I _do_
mind, and I am sure the blemish would sadly mar my proper judgment of
the lovely feature for gazing on which those eyes have lost their
rectitude. For the ears a journey to Brighton to see Miss Robinson, the
Vicar's daughter, is recommended. No, she may listen, think I, to the
"sad sea-waves," or to her father's sermons, but never to any flattery
from me. The mouth I shall find in Cardiff--not an English or Welsh
mouth, but a sweet Spaniard's Senora Niccolomino, the daughter of a
merchant there. In imagination I picture that cigarette held so lovingly
in those perfect lips. But I am to draw an English heroine of fifteen
innocent summers--how those curly wreaths of pearly smoke would
disenchant my mind of the spell of youth an