Six weeks’ exploration was enough to exhaust my funds, and I carried my squeezes and my sketches back to Cambridge, there to put the results into shape.... And there I found, and re-read with a suddenly re-kindled interest those pages of blue foolscap on the first of which was the heading “Dodo.” I had written them chiefly for my own amusement, but now, rightly or wrongly, I had the conviction that they might amuse others as well. But I really had no idea, till I took them out again, what they were like; now it occurred to me that the people in them were something like real people, and that the whole in point of agitating fact was something like a real book, that might be printed and bound.... But I instantly wanted another and if possible a story-teller’s opinion about it, and sent it off to my mother, asking her to read it first, and if it seemed to her to provide any species of entertainment, to think whether she could not manage to induce Mrs. Harrison (Lucas Malet) or Henry James, to cast a professional eye over it. She managed this with such success, that a few days afterwards she wrote to me to say that Henry James had consented to read it, and give his frank opinion. The packet she had already, on his consent, despatched to him. Now this MSS. which thus had reached the kindest man in the world, was written in a furious hurry and covered with erasures, that exploded into illegible interpolations, and was indited in such a hand as we employ on a note that has to be dashed off when it is time already to go to the station. This was genially hinted at when late in November the recipient announced to me his judgment in the matter; for he prefaced his criticism with an apology for having kept it so long, and allowed that, in consenting to read and criticize, he had “rather overestimated the attention I should be able to give to a production in manuscript of such substantial length. We live in such a world of type-copy to-day that I had taken for granted your story would come to me in that form....”