Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (278 page)

“‘It
is
a Square!’
was Balbus’s first cry of delight as he gazed around him.
‘Beautiful!
Beau-ti-ful!
And
rectangular!’
and as he plunged into Geometry he also plunged into funny conversations with the average English landlady, which we can better follow:

“‘Which there is
one
room, gentlemen,’ said the smiling landlady, ‘and a sweet room, too.
As snug a little back room——’

“‘We will see it,’ said Balbus gloomily as they followed her in.
‘I knew how it would be!
One room in each house!
No view I suppose.’

“‘Which indeed there
is
, gentlemen!’
the landlady indignantly protested as she drew up the blind, and indicated the back garden.

“‘Cabbages, I perceive,’ said Balbus.
‘Well, they’re green at any rate.’

“‘Which the greens at the shops,’ their hostess explained, ‘are by no means dependable upon.
Here you has them on the premises,
and
of the best.’

“‘Does the window open?’
was always Balbus’s first question in testing a lodging; and ‘Does the chimney smoke?’
his second.
Satisfied on all points, he secured the refusal of the room, and moved on to the next house where they repeated the same performance, adding as an afterthought: ‘Does the cat scratch?’

“The landlady looked around suspiciously as if to make sure the cat was not listening.
‘I will not deceive you, gentlemen,’ she said, ‘it
do
scratch, but not without you pulls its whiskers.
It’ll never do it,’ she repeated slowly, with a visible effort to recall the exact words between herself and the cat, ‘without you pulls its whiskers!’

“‘Much may be excused in a cat so treated,’ said Balbus as they left the house, ...
leaving the landlady curtseying on the doorstep and still murmuring to herself her parting words, as if they were a form of blessing, ‘not without you pulls its whiskers!’”

He has given us a real Dickens atmosphere in the dialogue, but the medicinal problem tucked into it all is too much like hard work.

There were ten of these “Knots,” each one harder than its predecessor, and Lewis Carroll found much interest in receiving and criticising the answers, all sent under fictitious names.

This clever mathematician delighted in “puzzlers,” and sometimes he found a kindred soul among the guessers, which always pleased him.

One of his favorite problems was one that as early as the days of the
Rectory Umbrella
he brought before his limited public.
He called it
Difficulty No.
1
.

“Where in its passage round the earth does the day change its name?”

This question pursued him all through his mathematical career, and the difficulty of answering it has never lessened.
Even in “A Tangled Tale” neither Balbus nor his ambitious young pupils could do much with the problem.

Difficulty No.
2
is very humorous, and somewhat of a “catch” question.

“Which is the best—a clock that is right only once a year, or a clock that is right twice every day?”

In March, 1897,
Vanity Fair
, a current English magazine, had the following article entitled:

“A New Puzzle.”

“The readers of
Vanity Fair
have, during the last ten years, shown so much interest in Acrostics and Hard Cases, which were at first made the object of sustained competition for prizes in the journal, that it has been sought to invent for them an entirely new kind of Puzzle, such as would interest them equally with those that have already been so successful.
The subjoined letter from Mr.
Lewis Carroll will explain itself, and will introduce a Puzzle so entirely novel and withal so interesting that the transmutation [changing] of the original into the final word of the Doublets may be expected to become an occupation, to the full as amusing as the guessing of the Double Acrostics has already proved.”

“Dear Vanity,” Lewis Carroll writes:—“Just a year ago last Christmas two young ladies, smarting under that sorest scourge of feminine humanity, the having “nothing to do,” besought me to send them “some riddles.”
But riddles I had none at hand and therefore set myself to devise some other form of verbal torture which should serve the same purpose.
The result of my meditations was a new kind of Puzzle, new at least to me, which now that it has been fairly tested by a year’s experience, and commended by many friends, I offer to you as a newly gathered nut to be cracked by the omnivorous teeth that have already masticated so many of your Double Acrostics.

“The rules of the Puzzle are simple enough.
Two words are proposed, of the same length; and the Puzzle consists in linking these together by interposing other words, each of which shall differ from the next word
in one letter only
.
That is to say, one letter may be changed in one of the given words, then one letter in the word so obtained, and so on, till we arrive at the other given word.
The letters must not be interchanged among themselves, but each must keep to its own place.
As an example, the word ‘head’ may be changed into ‘tail’ by interposing the words ‘heal, teal, tell, tall.’
I call the two given words ‘a Doublet,’ the interposed words ‘Links,’ and the entire series ‘a Chain,’ of which I here append an example:

Head

heal

teal

tell

tall

Tail

“It is perhaps needless to state that the links should be English words, such as might be used in good society.

“The easiest ‘Doublets’ are those in which the consonants in one word answer to the consonants in the other, and the vowels to vowels; ‘head’ and ‘tail’ constitute a Doublet of this kind.
Where this is not the case, as in ‘head’ and ‘hare,’ the first thing to be done is to transform one member of the Doublet into a word whose consonants and vowels shall answer to those in the other member (‘head, herd, here’), after which there is seldom much difficulty in completing the ‘Chain.’...

“Lewis Carroll.”

“Doublets” was brought out in book form in 1880, and proved a very attractive little volume.

“The Game of Logic” and “A Tangled Tale” are also in book form, the latter cleverly illustrated by Arthur B.
Frost.

It would take too long to name all the games and puzzles Lewis Carroll invented.
Some were carefully thought out, some were produced on the spur of the moment, generally for the amusement of some special child friend.
Indeed, the puzzles and riddles and games had accumulated to such an extent that he was arranging to publish a book of them with illustrations by Miss E.
Gertrude Thomson, but after his death the plans fell through, and many literary projects were abandoned.

Acrostic writing was one of his favorite pastimes, and he wrote enough of these to have filled a good fat little volume.

His Wonderland Stamp-Case, one of his own ingenious inventions, might come under the head of “Puzzles and Problems,” and, oddly enough, an interesting description of this stamp-case was published only a short time ago in
The Nation
.
The writer describes his own copy which he bought when it was new, some twenty years ago.
There is first an envelope of red paper, on which is printed:

The “Wonderland” Postage Stamp-Case,

Invented by Louis Carroll, Oct.
29, 1888.

This case contains 12 separate packets for

Stamps of different values, and 2 Coloured

Pictorial Surprises, taken from “Alice in

Wonderland.”
It is accompanied with 8 or

9 Wise Words about Letter-Writing.

1st, post-free, 13d.

On the flap of the envelope is:

Published by Emberlin & Son,

4 Magdalen Street, Oxford.

“The Stamp-Case,” the writer tells us, “consists of a stiff paper folded with the pockets on the inner leaves and a picture on each outer leaf.
This Case is inclosed in a sliding cover, and in this way the pictorial surprise becomes possible.
A picture of
Alice
holding the
Baby
is on the front cover, and when this is drawn off, there is underneath a picture of
Alice
nursing a pig.
On the back cover is the famous
Cat
, which vanishes to a shadowy grin on the pictures beneath.”

The booklet which accompanied this little stamp-case found its way to many of his girl friends.
Now, whether they bought it, or whether, under guise of giving a present, this clever friend of theirs sent them the stamp-case with the “eight or nine words of advice” slyly tucked in, we cannot say, but in the case of Isa Bowman and of Beatrice Hatch the booklet evidently made a deep impression, for both quote from it very freely, and some of the “wise words” are certainly worth heeding, for instance:

“
Address and stamp the envelope.
”

“What!
Before writing the letter?”

“Most certainly; and I’ll tell you what will happen if you don’t.
You will go on writing till the last moment, and just in the middle of the last sentence you will become aware that ‘time’s up!’
Then comes the hurried wind-up—the wildly scrawled signature—the hastily fastened envelope which comes open in the post—the address—a mere hieroglyphic—the horrible discovery that you’ve forgotten to replenish your stamp-case—the frantic appeal to everyone in the house to lend you a stamp—the headlong rush to the Post Office, arriving hot and gasping, just after the box has been closed—and finally, a week afterwards, the return of the letter from the dead letter office, marked, ‘address illegible.’”

“
Write legibly.

“The average temper of the human race would be perceptibly sweetened if everybody obeyed this rule.
A great deal of bad writing in the world comes simply from writing
too quickly
.
Of course you reply, ‘I do it to save time.’
A very good object no doubt; but what right have you to do it at your friend’s expense?
Isn’t his time as valuable as yours?
Years ago I used to receive letters from a friend—and very interesting letters too—written in one of the most atrocious hands ever invented.
It generally took me about a week to read one of his letters!
I used to carry it about in my pocket and take it out at leisure times to puzzle over the riddles which composed it—holding it in different positions, till at last the meaning of some hopeless scrawl would flash upon me, when I at once wrote down the English under it; and when several had thus been guessed, the context would help me with the others till at last the whole series of hieroglyphics was deciphered.
If all one’s friends wrote like that, life would be entirely spent in reading their letters!”

“My Ninth Rule.
—When you get to the end of a note-sheet, and find you have more to say, take another piece of paper—a whole sheet or a scrap, as the case may demand, but whatever you do,
don’t cross
!
Remember the old proverb ‘Cross-writing makes cross-reading.’
‘The
old
proverb?’
you say inquiringly.
‘How old?’
Why, not so
very
ancient, I must confess.
In fact—I’m afraid I invented it while writing this paragraph.
Still, you know ‘old’ is a
comparative
term; I think you would be quite justified in addressing a chicken just out of the shell as ‘Old Boy!’
when compared
with another chicken that was only half out!”

“Don’t try to have the last word,” he tells us—and again, “
Don’t
fill more than a page and a half with apologies for not having written sooner.”

“
On how to end a letter
,” he advises the writer to “refer to your correspondent’s last letter, and make your winding up
at least as friendly as his
; in fact, even if a shade more friendly, it will do no harm.”

“When you take your letters to the post,
carry them in your hand
.
If you put them in your pocket, you will take a long country walk (I speak from experience), passing the post office twice, going and returning, and when you get home you will find them still in your pocket.”