I may just mention here that I was not the author of a Gaiety burlesque called _Cinder-Ellen up too late_. (Ellen was Nellie Farren, and the whole thing was a skit on _Cinderella up to date_.) Fred Leslie wrote it and also acted in it, and he took the pseudonym of ‘Actor’ but had it printed ‘A. C. Torr.’ He also wrote _Ruy Blas and the Blasé Roué_, and (I think) some other Gaiety burlesques, with this same pseudonym of A. C. Torr; and people who knew me very slightly, assumed that I had written it all, although the style was not a bit like mine. This was some thirty years ago, when I was writing solemnly on the chronology of the Egyptian kings--including Tut-anch-Amen, who was not so well known then as he is now. (Most of them deserved the title of the Duchess d’ Agio Uncertanti in _Ruy Blas_.) When my book on them came out, a friend of mine described it to me as a book to be given away with a pound of tea--he said readers would require at least a pound to keep them awake all through; and he could not possibly have said that of these plays. Style, however, is no sure guide to authorship. Think of “The owl and the pussy-cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat.” Unless the authorship were known, few people would ascribe it to the man whose travels inspired Tennyson, “Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls ... I read and felt that I was there.” Lear’s travels are forgotten, but his nonsense books are in the memory of everyone who read them when a child. Looking back to early years, I find the things I have remembered best, have seldom been the things best worth remembering; and other people tell me that they suffer from the same defect. I remember a pump at the Great Exhibition of 1862: many other things besides, but nothing else as clearly as that pump. It was rather like a four-post bedstead with four impervious sheets of water coming down between the posts; and it just took my fancy. I wrote two letters about it to my grandfather, telling him that I would take him round to see it, if he came up to town. Being four years old, and getting on for five, I felt quite capable of taking him about. And he wrote back to my father, 22 July 1862, “I certainly shall avail myself of his very kind promise to take me to the Exhibition and show me that very wonderful pump, for I did study hydraulics one day.” In a letter of his, 23 February 1862, mentioning his aunt’s first husband, he tells my father, “I remember him coming here to see my aunt before marriage, and he brought down the finest pine-apple I ever saw.” That was close on seventy years before, when my grandfather was a very small boy; and I suspect he had a clearer recollection of the pine-apple than of the man who brought it.