At that moment a gentleman entered, two little girls clinging to his hands, and, as I caught sight of the tall, slim figure, with the cleanshaven, delicate, refined face, I said to myself, "_That's_ Lewis Carroll." He stood for a moment, head erect, glancing swiftly over the room, then, bending down, whispered something to one of the children; she, after a moment's pause, pointed straight at me. Dropping their hands, he came forward, and, with that winning smile of his that utterly banished the oppressive sense of the Oxford don, said simply, "I am Mr. Dodgson; I was to meet you, I think?" To which I as frankly smiled, and said, "How did you know me so soon?" "My little friend found you. I told her I had come to meet a young lady who knew fairies, and she fixed on you at once. But _I_ knew you before she spoke." _The Gentleman, January 29, 1898_. AFTER MR. MASEFIELD [Sidenote: _Anon._] From '41 to '51 I was an almost model son. From '51 to '62 I wished to, but I didn't do. From '62 to '67 I took the shortest cut to heaven. From '67 to '79 I only drank one glass of wine. From '79 to '84 I felt that I could do with more. From '84 to '96 I found how hard it is to mix. From '96 to Nineteen-odd Quod: MISS STIPP OF PLOVER'S COURT [Sidenote: _H.B._] In a neighbourhood of narrow streets and tunnelling alleys, where there are few lamps and the policemen go two and two, where all day long you see fierce-eyed women hooded with shawls coming out of greasy street-doors with jugs in their hands, and where all day long sullen men stand at the dark entry to court and alley with pipes in their mouths and their hands in their pockets, and where the little children "awfully reverse our Saviour's words, and are not of the Kingdom of Heaven, but of the Kingdom of Hell"--in this dark, dangerous riverside neighbourhood, with its foul odours and its filthy gutters, lives one of the most defenceless women who ever came into human existence. I knock at a door in Plover's Court, and a half-dressed, half-starved, and wholly dirty child, with no boots to her feet, opens to me; and when this miserable heir of the ages, after she has stared at me like a famished animal, learns that I wish to see Miss Stipp, she bids me "go up." The narrow passage is hung with two lines of washing; and, pushing through the avenue formed by these dank garments, I catch sight in the stone-paved kitchen beyond of a big-headed, whitewashed-looking infant sprawling on the floor collecting soap-suds, and a woman in the midst of voluminous steam working her arms about in a dripping wash tub.