"As to your Sylvie I am charmed with your idea of dressing her in _white_; it exactly fits my own idea of her; I want her to be a sort of embodiment of Purity. So I think that, in Society, she should be wholly in white--white frock ('clinging' certainly; I _hate_ crinoline fashion): also I _think_ we might venture on making her _fairy_ dress transparent. Don't you think we might face Mrs. Grundy to _that_ extent? In fact I think Mrs. G. would be fairly content at finding her _dressed_, and would not mind whether the material was silk, or muslin, or even gauze. One thing more. _Please_ don't give Sylvie high heels! They are an abomination to me." Then for months we corresponded about the face of the Heroine alone. My 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.