Page:Collingwood - Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll.djvu/114

Rh to do needs, I hope, no saying, but the circumstances have at times been too strong for me.

Though in later years Mr. Dodgson almost gave up the habit of dining out, at this time of his life he used to do it pretty frequently, and several of the notes in his Diary refer to after-dinner and Common Room stories. The two following extracts will show the sort of facts he recorded:—

January 2, 1861.—Mr. Grey (Canon) came to dine and stay the night. He told me a curious old custom of millers, that they place the sails of the mill as a Saint Andrew's Cross when work is entirely suspended, thus ×, but in an upright cross, thus +, if they are just going to resume work. He also mentioned that he was at school with Dr. Tennyson (father of the poet), and was a great favourite of his. He remembers that Tennyson used to do his school-translations in rhyme. May 9th.—Met in Common Room Rev. C. F. Knight, and the Hon$ble$. F. J. Parker, both of Boston, U.S. The former gave an amusing account of having seen Oliver Wendell Holmes in a fishmonger's, lecturing extempore on the head of a freshly killed turtle, whose eyes and jaws still showed muscular action: the lecture of course being all "cram," but accepted as sober earnest by the mob outside.

Old Oxford men will remember the controversies that raged from about 1860 onwards over the opinions of the late Dr. Jowett. In my time the name "Jowett" only represented the