Page:Complete Works of Lewis Carroll.djvu/26

6 to venture to ask a favour of you, and to trust that you will not misinterpret my motives in doing so.

The favour I would ask is, that you will not tell me any more stories, such as you did on Friday, of remarks which children are said to have made on very sacred subjects—remarks which most people would recognize as irreverent, if made by grown-up people, but which are assumed to be innocent when made by children who are unconscious of any irreverence, the strange conclusion being drawn that they are therefore innocent when repeated by a grown-up person.

The misinterpretation I would guard against is your supposing that I regard such repetition as always wrong in any grown-up person. Let me assure you that I do not so regard it. I am always willing to believe that those who repeat such stories differ wholly from myself in their views of what is, and what is not, fitting treatment of sacred things, and I fully recognize that what would certainly be wrong in me, is not necessarily so in them.

So I simply ask it as a personal favour to myself. The hearing of that anecdote gave me so much pain, and spoiled so much the pleasure of my tiny dinner-party, that I feel sure you will kindly spare me such in future.

Above all he was the kind of man who, in publishing his Pillow Problems (part of his series of Curiosa Mathematica) recommended these exercises in mental arithmetic not only as an agreeable diversion for a sleepless couch but, more especially, as a way of driving out the skeptical thoughts, the blasphemous thoughts, and "the unholy thoughts, which torture with their hateful presence the fancy that would fain be pure."

And yet in all the anthology of the gentlest art compiled by Mr. Lucas, there are no letters more charming or more frivolous than those which Lewis Carroll wrote to any one of the little girls in whose presence only he was a truly free spirit and at whose courts he was happy to play jester