He was something of a conjurer, too, and in wig and gown, could amaze his audience for hours with his inexhaustible supply of tricks. He also made some quaint-looking marionettes, and a theater for them to act in, even writing the plays, which were masterpieces in their way. Once he traced a maze upon the snow-covered lawn of the rectory.
Mazes were often found in the real old-time gardens of England; they consisted of intersecting paths bordered by clipped shrubbery and generally arranged in geometrical designs, very puzzling to the unwary person who got lost in them, unable to discover a way out, until by some happy accident the right path was found. “Threading the Maze” was a fashionable pastime in the days of the Tudors; the maze at Hampton Court being one of the most remarkable of that period.
Charles’s early knowledge of mathematics made his work on the snow-covered lawn all the more remarkable, for the love of that particular branch of learning certainly grew with his growth.
Meanwhile, it was a very serious, earnest little boy, who looked down the long line of Dodgsons, saying with a choke in his voice: “I must leave you and this lovely rectory, and this fair, smiling countryside, and go to school.”
He was shy, and the thought struck terror; but everybody who is anybody in England goes to some fine public school before becoming an Oxford or a Cambridge student, and for that reason Charles Lutwidge Dodgson buried his regrets beneath a smiling face, bade farewell to his household, and at the mature age of twelve, armed with enough Greek and Latin to have made a dictionary, with a knowledge of mathematics that a college “don” might well have envied, set forth to this alluring world of books and learning.
CHAPTER II.
SCHOOL DAYS AT RICHMOND AND RUGBY.
