I give to other little maids
          A smile, a kiss, a look,
        Presents whose memory quickly fades,
          I give to these—­a Book.

        Happy Arcadia may blind,
          While all abroad, their eyes;
        At home, this book (I trust) they’ll find
          A very catching prize.

The next three letters were addressed to two of Mr. Arthur Hughes’ children.  They are good examples of the wild and delightful nonsense with which Lewis Carroll used to amuse his little friends:—­

My dear Agnes,—­You lazy thing!  What?  I’m to divide the kisses myself, am I?  Indeed I won’t take the trouble to do anything of the sort!  But I’ll tell you how to do it.  First, you must take four of the kisses, and—­and that reminds me of a very curious thing that happened to me at half-past four yesterday.  Three visitors came knocking at my door, begging me to let them in.  And when I opened the door, who do you think they were?  You’ll never guess.  Why, they were three cats!  Wasn’t it curious?  However, they all looked so cross and disagreeable that I took up the first thing I could lay my hand on (which happened to be the rolling-pin) and knocked them all down as flat as pan-cakes!  “If you come knocking at my door,” I said, “I shall come knocking at your heads.”  “That was fair, wasn’t it?”

    Yours affectionately,

    Lewis Carroll.

My dear Agnes,—­About the cats, you know.  Of course I didn’t leave them lying flat on the ground like dried flowers:  no, I picked them up, and I was as kind as I could be to them.  I lent them the portfolio for a bed—­they wouldn’t have been comfortable in a real bed, you know:  they were too thin—­but they were quite happy between the sheets of blotting-paper—­and each of them had a pen-wiper for a pillow.  Well, then I went to bed:  but first I lent them the three dinner-bells, to ring if they wanted anything in the night.

You know I have three dinner-bells—­the first (which is the largest) is rung when dinner is nearly ready; the second (which is rather larger) is rung when it is quite ready; and the third (which is as large as the other two put together) is rung all the time I am at dinner.  Well, I told them they might ring if they happened to want anything—­and, as they rang all the bells all night, I suppose they did want something or other, only I was too sleepy to attend to them.

In the morning I gave them some rat-tail jelly and buttered mice for breakfast, and they were as discontented as they could be.  They wanted some boiled pelican, but of course I knew it wouldn’t be good for them.  So all I said was “Go to Number Two, Finborough Road, and ask for Agnes Hughes, and if it’s really good for you, she’ll give you