“‘Much may be excused in a cat so treated,’ said Balbus as they left the house, ... leaving the landlady curtseying on the doorstep and still murmuring to herself her parting words, as if they were a form of blessing, ‘not without you pulls its whiskers!’”
He has given us a real Dickens atmosphere in the dialogue, but the medicinal problem tucked into it all is too much like hard work.
There were ten of these “Knots,” each one harder than its predecessor, and Lewis Carroll found much interest in receiving and criticising the answers, all sent under fictitious names.
This clever mathematician delighted in “puzzlers,” and sometimes he found a kindred soul among the guessers, which always pleased him.
One of his favorite problems was one that as early as the days of the Rectory Umbrella he brought before his limited public. He called it Difficulty No. 1.
“Where in its passage round the earth does the day change its name?”
This question pursued him all through his mathematical career, and the difficulty of answering it has never lessened. Even in “A Tangled Tale” neither Balbus nor his ambitious young pupils could do much with the problem.
Difficulty No. 2 is very humorous, and somewhat of a “catch” question.
“Which is the best—a clock that is right only once a year, or a clock that is right twice every day?”
In March, 1897, Vanity Fair, a current English magazine, had the following article entitled: