Part 22 (2/2)

In the morning the deep notes of ”Great Tom” woke her and then began another lovely day with her ”Uncle.” She speaks of two tiny turret rooms, one on each side of his staircase in Christ Church. ”He used to tell me,”

she writes, ”that when I grew up and became married, he would give me the two little rooms, so that if I ever disagreed with my husband, we could each of us retire to a turret until we had made up our quarrel.”

She, too, was fascinated by his collection of music-boxes, the finest, she thought, to be found anywhere in the world. ”There were big black ebony boxes with gla.s.s tops, through which you could see all the works. There was a big box with a handle, which it was quite hard exercise for a little girl to turn, and there must have been twenty or thirty little ones which could only play one tune. Sometimes one of the musical boxes would not play properly and then I always got tremendously excited. Uncle used to go to a drawer in the table and produce a box of little screw-drivers and punches, and while I sat on his knee, he would unscrew the lid and take out the wheels to see what was the matter. He must have been a clever mechanist, for the result was always the same--after a longer or shorter period, the music began again. Sometimes, when the musical boxes had played all their tunes, he used to put them in the box backwards, and was as pleased as I was at the comic effect of the music 'standing on its head,' as he phrased it.

”There was another and very wonderful toy which he sometimes produced for me, and this was known as 'The Bat.' The ceilings of the rooms in which he lived were very high, indeed, and admirably suited for the purposes of 'The Bat.' It was an ingeniously constructed toy of gauze and wire, which actually flew about the room like a bat. It was worked by a piece of twisted elastic, and it could fly for about half a minute. I was always a little afraid of this toy because it was too lifelike, but there was a fearful joy in it. When the music boxes began to pall, he would get up from his chair and look at me with a knowing smile. I always knew what was coming, even before he began to speak, and I used to dance up and down in tremendous antic.i.p.ation.

”'Isa, my darling,' he would say, 'once upon a time there was someone called Bob, the Bat! and he lived in the top left-hand drawer of the writing table. What could he do when Uncle wound him up?'”

”And then I would squeak out breathlessly: 'He could really _fly_!'”

And Bob the Bat had many wonderful adventures. She tells us how, on a hot summer morning when the window was wide open, Bob flew out into the garden and landed in a bowl of salad that one of the servants was carrying to someone's room. The poor fellow was so frightened by this sudden apparition that he promptly dropped the bowl, breaking it into countless pieces.

Lewis Carroll never liked ”his little girl” to exaggerate. ”I remember,”

she tells us, ”how annoyed he once was when, after a morning's sea bathing at Eastbourne, I exclaimed: 'Oh, this salt water, it always makes my hair as stiff as a poker!'

”He impressed upon me quite irritably that no little girl's hair could ever possibly get as _stiff as a poker_. 'If you had said ”as stiff as wires” it would have been more like it, but even that would have been an exaggeration.' And then seeing I was a little frightened, he drew for me a picture of 'The little girl called Isa, whose hair turned into pokers because she was always exaggerating things.'

”'I nearly died of laughing' was another expression that he particularly disliked; in fact, any form of exaggeration generally called from him a reproof, though he was sometimes content to make fun. For instance, my sisters and I had sent him 'millions of kisses' in a letter.' Here is his answer:

”'Ch. Ch. Oxford. Ap. 14, 1890.

”'MY OWN DARLING:

”'It's all very well for you and Nellie and Emsie to write in millions of hugs and kisses, but please consider the _time_ it would occupy your poor old very busy uncle! Try hugging and kissing Emsie for a minute by the watch and I don't think you'll manage it more than 20 times a minute. ”Millions” must mean two millions at least.'”

Then follows a characteristic example in arithmetic:

20)2,000,000 hugs and kisses.

------------ 60)100,000 minutes.

---------- 12)1,666 hours.

-------- 6)138 days (at twelve hours a day).

----- 23 weeks.

”I couldn't go on hugging and kissing more than 12 hours a day; and I wouldn't like to spend _Sundays_ that way. So you see it would take _23_ weeks of hard work. Really, my dear child, I cannot spare the time.

”Why haven't I written since my last letter? Why, how could I have written _since the last time I did_ write? Now you just try it with kissing. Go and kiss Nellie, from me, several times, and take care to manage it so as to have kissed her _since the last time you did_ kiss her. Now go back to your place and I'll question you.

”'Have you kissed her several times?'

”'Yes, darling Uncle.'

”'What o'clock was it when you gave her the _last_ kiss?'

”'Five minutes past 10, Uncle.'

”'Very well, now, have you kissed her _since_?'

<script>