"Tellus a story!" was the constant cry of the Dean's daughters whenever they met Mr Dodgson. His great gift as a story-teller was that he wove the story round the child's experiences, making of them a fantastic Wonderland, but taking care to follow where their own imaginations suggested, so that the child always remained at the centre of the story. As Alice herself said, "the stories grew into new tales owing to the frequent interruptions, which opened up fresh and undreamed-of possibilities." Stories lived and died like summer midges when they were together, in the words of Charles Dodgson, but after one memorial expedition on the river to the Godstow on 4 July, 1862, Alice persuaded him to write the stories down for her. When he wrote the little book "for a dear child in memory of a summer's day" he had no thought of publishing it, but friends who saw it insisted that he must do so. The book was published by Macmillans in 1865 as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and a second volume of the stories was published much later and called Through the Looking Glass.