“A New Puzzle.”
“The readers of Vanity Fair have, during the last ten years, shown so much interest in Acrostics and Hard Cases, which were at first made the object of sustained competition for prizes in the journal, that it has been sought to invent for them an entirely new kind of Puzzle, such as would interest them equally with those that have already been so successful. The subjoined letter from Mr. Lewis Carroll will explain itself, and will introduce a Puzzle so entirely novel and withal so interesting that the transmutation [changing] of the original into the final word of the Doublets may be expected to become an occupation, to the full as amusing as the guessing of the Double Acrostics has already proved.”
“Dear Vanity,” Lewis Carroll writes:—“Just a year ago last Christmas two young ladies, smarting under that sorest scourge of feminine humanity, the having “nothing to do,” besought me to send them “some riddles.” But riddles I had none at hand and therefore set myself to devise some other form of verbal torture which should serve the same purpose. The result of my meditations was a new kind of Puzzle, new at least to me, which now that it has been fairly tested by a year’s experience, and commended by many friends, I offer to you as a newly gathered nut to be cracked by the omnivorous teeth that have already masticated so many of your Double Acrostics.
“The rules of the Puzzle are simple enough. Two words are proposed, of the same length; and the Puzzle consists in linking these together by interposing other words, each of which shall differ from the next word in one letter only. That is to say, one letter may be changed in one of the given words, then one letter in the word so obtained, and so on, till we arrive at the other given word. The letters must not be interchanged among themselves, but each must keep to its own place. As an example, the word ‘head’ may be changed into ‘tail’ by interposing the words ‘heal, teal, tell, tall.’ I call the two given words ‘a Doublet,’ the interposed words ‘Links,’ and the entire series ‘a Chain,’ of which I here append an example:
Head
heal
teal
tell
tall
Tail
“It is perhaps needless to state that the links should be English words, such as might be used in good society.
“The easiest ‘Doublets’ are those in which the consonants in one word answer to the consonants in the other, and the vowels to vowels; ‘head’ and ‘tail’ constitute a Doublet of this kind. Where this is not the case, as in ‘head’ and ‘hare,’ the first thing to be done is to transform one member of the Doublet into a word whose consonants and vowels shall answer to those in the other member (‘head, herd, here’), after which there is seldom much difficulty in completing the ‘Chain.’...
“Lewis Carroll.”
“Doublets” was brought out in book form in 1880, and proved a very attractive little volume.
“The Game of Logic” and “A Tangled Tale” are also in book form, the latter cleverly illustrated by Arthur B. Frost.