LEWIS CARROLL

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 254, 18 June 1932, Page 3

LEWIS CARROLL

THREE SHORT STORIES. The Bishop of Oxford, writing in the London Times with reference to the Lewis Carroll centenary, tells" the following story: — "There was a rule-of-three question which he told me he oeeasionally UeT — in hopes of ascertaining whether the pupils had thought at all of the relevance of arithmetic to things. If it takes 10 men so many days to build a wall, how long would it take 300,000 men? The answer would come, giving a very short space of time. "Then Dodgson would comment: £You don't seem to have observed that that wall would go up like a flash of ligtning, and that most of those men could not have got within a mile of it.' A baffling comment such as this upon a successful calculation cannot have encouraged confidence. "The late Harry Furniss, the artist," says the Liverpool Post, "has given an amusing example of Carroll's shrinking propensity. He tells how Carroll visited hina to see some illustrations to one of his books that Furniss had been commissioned to do for him. After dinner, 'Now for the Studio,' said Carroll. Furniss rose and led the way, although Mrs. Furniss, knowing that her husband had nothing to show, sat in astonished dismay. My hand is on the handle. Through excitement Lewis stammers wrose than ever. I pause, turn my back to the closed door, and thus addressed the astonished don: 'Mr. Dodgson, _ I am very eccentric — I cannot help it. Let me explain to you clearly, before you enter my studio, that my eccentricity sometimes takes a violent form. If I, in showing my work, discover in your face the slightest sign that you are not absolutely satisOfied with any particle of this work in progress^the whole of it goes into the fire. It is a risk; will you accept it, or will you wait till I have the drawings quite . finished and send them to you at Oxford?" "Travelling from Victoria to Eastbourne," says the News-Chronicle, "he amused a schoolgirl (now Mrs. D. J. Mason, wife of Col. Mason, the West Cumberland coroner) with puzzles and afterwards sent her the following further problems. "'Make sense of this sent'ence: "It was and I said not all." " 'Make the letters of this sentence into one word. "Nor do we".' 'The answer to the first one is possibly 'It was "And, I said, not "all." ' The answer to the second puzzle is ~ 'One Word'."