her return. The poor thing seemed really
alarmed and distressed. However, I got a man to come from a
neighbouring yard with a ladder, and got in at the
drawing-room window--a novel way of entering a friend's
house!

Oddly enough, almost exactly the same thing happened to him in 1888:
"The door blew shut, with the maid outside, and no one in the house. I
got the cook of the next house to let me go through their premises,
and with the help of a pair of steps got over the wall between the two
back-yards."

In July there appeared an article in the _St. James's Gazette_ on
the subject of "Parliamentary Elections," written by Mr. Dodgson. It
was a subject in which he was much interested, and a few years before
he had contributed a long letter on the "Purity of Elections" to the
same newspaper. I wish I had space to give both in full; as things
are, a summary and a few extracts are all I dare attempt. The writer
held that there are a great number of voters, and _pari passu_ a
great number of constituencies, that like to be on the winning side,
and whose votes are chiefly influenced by that consideration. The
ballot-box has made it practically impossible for the individual voter
to know which is going to be the winning side, but after the first few
days of a general election, one side or the other has generally got a
more or less decided advantage, and a weak-kneed constituency is
sorely tempted to swell the tide of victory.

But this is not all. The evil extends further than to the
single constituency; nay, it extends further than to a
single general election; it constitutes a feature in our
national history; it is darkly ominous for the future of
England. So long as general elections are conducted as at
present we shall be liable to oscillations of political
power, like those of 1874 and 1880, but of ever-increasing
violence--one Parliament wholly at the mercy of one
political party, the next wholly at the mercy of the
other--while the Government of the hour, joyfully hastening
to undo all that its predecessors have done, will wield a
majority so immense that the fate of every question will be
foredoomed, and debate will be a farce; in one word, we
shall be a nation living from hand to mouth, and with no
settled principle--an army, whose only marching orders will
be "Right about face!"

His remedy was that the result of each single electio