“There was another and very wonderful toy which he sometimes produced for me, and this was known as ‘The Bat.’ The ceilings of the rooms in which he lived were very high, indeed, and admirably suited for the purposes of ‘The Bat.’ It was an ingeniously constructed toy of gauze and wire, which actually flew about the room like a bat. It was worked by a piece of twisted elastic, and it could fly for about half a minute. I was always a little afraid of this toy because it was too lifelike, but there was a fearful joy in it. When the music boxes began to pall, he would get up from his chair and look at me with a knowing smile. I always knew what was coming, even before he began to speak, and I used to dance up and down in tremendous anticipation.
“‘Isa, my darling,’ he would say, ‘once upon a time there was someone called Bob, the Bat! and he lived in the top left-hand drawer of the writing table. What could he do when Uncle wound him up?’”
“And then I would squeak out breathlessly: ‘He could really fly!’”
And Bob the Bat had many wonderful adventures. She tells us how, on a hot summer morning when the window was wide open, Bob flew out into the garden and landed in a bowl of salad that one of the servants was carrying to someone’s room. The poor fellow was so frightened by this sudden apparition that he promptly dropped the bowl, breaking it into countless pieces.
Lewis Carroll never liked “his little girl” to exaggerate. “I remember,” she tells us, “how annoyed he once was when, after a morning’s sea bathing at Eastbourne, I exclaimed: ‘Oh, this salt water, it always makes my hair as stiff as a poker!’
“He impressed upon me quite irritably that no little girl’s hair could ever possibly get as stiff as a poker. ‘If you had said “as stiff as wires” it would have been more like it, but even that would have been an exaggeration.’ And then seeing I was a little frightened, he drew for me a picture of ‘The little girl called Isa, whose hair turned into pokers because she was always exaggerating things.’
“‘I nearly died of laughing’ was another expression that he particularly disliked; in fact, any form of exaggeration generally called from him a reproof, though he was sometimes content to make fun. For instance, my sisters and I had sent him ‘millions of kisses’ in a letter.’ Here is his answer:
“‘Ch. Ch. Oxford. Ap. 14, 1890.
“‘My own Darling:
“‘It’s all very well for you and Nellie and Emsie to write in millions of hugs and kisses, but please consider the time it would occupy your poor old very busy uncle! Try hugging and kissing Emsie for a minute by the watch and I don’t think you’ll manage it more than 20 times a minute. “Millions” must mean two millions at least.’”