After lunch he said he would drive me to St. Deiniol’s, the library, chiefly theological and philosophical, that he was arranging, largely with his own hands, from his vast accumulation of books, for the benefit of the district, and in especial, for that of clerical students whose Church he had vainly attempted to disestablish. Soon after lunch it was announced that the carriage was round, and he went to the door. I had supposed that there would be some brougham or whatnot in charge of a coachman; instead there was a pony carriage for two, with a groom holding tight on to the pony’s head. Mr. Gladstone, already very dim-sighted, peered at the pony, and said to me, “Wait a minute: that pony’s a beast,” and hurried back into the house reappearing again with a formidable whip. Then I became aware that he and I were going alone, and that Mr. Gladstone, armed with this whip in case the pony was “beastly,” was intending to drive, for he took up the reins, and, as soon as I was in, said to the groom, “Let go, Charles,” and whacked the pony over the rump to teach him that there was his master sitting inside. Under this charioteer, blind and aged and completely intrepid, we cantered away to St. Deiniol’s, Mr. Gladstone pointing at objects of interest with his whip, and reminding the pony that he would catch it, if he misbehaved. From there, I think he drove me to the station and returned alone. I duly sent him squeezes prepared in the manner he had prescribed, and received a series of post-cards suggesting the probable readings of erased letters, and when next I went to Hawarden that autumn, there were passages he had turned up in the “_Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_” which bore on this tombstone and on that, discharged at me as if from a volcano....
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.