First, he met her at Paddington station; then he took her to see a panorama of the Falls of Niagara, after which they had dinner with a Mrs. Dymes, and two of her children, Helen and Maud, went with them to Terry’s Theater to see “Little Lord Fauntleroy” played by Vera Beringer, another little actress friend of Lewis Carroll. After this they all took the Metropolitan railway; the little Dymes girls got off at their station, but Isa and the Aged Aged Man, as he called himself, went on to Oxford. There they saw everything to be seen, beginning with Christ Church, where the “A.A.M.” lived, and here and there Lewis Carroll managed to throw bits of history into the funny little diary. They saw all the colleges, and Christ Church Meadow, and the barges which the Oxford crews used as boathouses, and took long walks, and went to St. Mary’s Church on Sunday, and lots of other interesting things.
Every year she stayed a while with him at Eastbourne, where she tells us she was even happier if possible. Her day at Eastbourne began very early. Her room faced his, and after she was dressed in the morning she would steal into the little passage quiet as a mouse, and sit on the top stair, her eye on his closed door, watching for the signal of admission into his room; this was a newspaper pushed under his door. The moment she saw that, she was at liberty to rush in and fling herself upon him, after which excitement they went down to breakfast. Then he read a chapter from the Bible and made her tell it to him afterwards as a story of her own, beginning always with, “Once upon a time.” After which there was a daily visit to the swimming-bath followed by one to the dentist—he always insisted on this, going himself quite as regularly.
After lunch, which with him consisted of a glass of sherry and a biscuit, while little Miss Isa ate a good substantial dinner, there was a game of backgammon, of which he was very fond, and then a long, long walk to the top of Beachy Head, which Isa hated. She says:
“Lewis Carroll believed very much in a great amount of exercise, and said one should always go to bed physically wearied with the exercise of the day. Accordingly, there was no way out of it, and every afternoon I had to walk to the top of Beachy Head. He was very good and kind. He would invent all sorts of new games to beguile the tedium of the way. One very curious and strange trait in his character was shown in these walks. I used to be very fond of flowers and animals also. A pretty dog or a hedge of honeysuckle was always a pleasant event upon our walk to me. And yet he himself cared for neither flowers nor animals. Tender and kind as he was, simple and unassuming in all his tastes, yet he did not like flowers.... He knew children so thoroughly and well, that it is all the stranger that he did not care for things that generally attract them so much.... When I was in raptures over a poppy or a dog-rose, he would try hard to be as interested as I was, but even to my childish eyes it was an effort, and he would always rather invent some new game for us to play at. Once, and once only, I remember him to have taken an interest in a flower, and that was because of the folklore that was attached to it, and not because of the beauty of the flower itself.
“... One day while we sat under a great tree, and the hum of the myriad insect life rivaled the murmur of the far-away waves, he took a foxglove from the heap that lay in my lap, and told me the story of how it came by its name; how in the old days, when all over England there were great forests, like the forest of Arden that Shakespeare loved, the pixies, the ‘little folks,’ used to wander at night in the glades, like Titania and Oberon and Puck, and because they took great pride in their dainty hands they made themselves gloves out of the flowers. So the particular flower that the ‘little folks’ used came to be called ‘folks’ gloves.’ Then, because the country people were rough and clumsy in their talk, the name was shortened into ‘foxgloves,’ the name that everyone uses now.”
This special walk always ended in the coastguard’s house, where they partook of tea and rock cake, and here most of his prettiest stories were told. The most thrilling part occurred when “the children came to a deep dark wood,” always described with a solemn dropping of the voice; by that Isa knew that the exciting part was coming, then she crept nearer to him, and he held her close while he finished the tale. Isa, as was quite natural, was a most dramatic little person, so she always knew what emotions would suit the occasion, and used them like the clever little actress that she was.
We find something very beautiful in this intimacy between the grave scholar and the light-hearted, innocent little girl, who used to love to watch him in some of those deep silences which neither cared to break. This small maid understood his every mood. A beautiful sunset, she tells us, touched him deeply. He would take off his hat and let the wind toss his hair, and look seaward with a very grave face. Once she saw tears in his eyes, and he gripped her hand very hard as they turned away.
Perhaps, what caught her childish fancy more than anything else, was his observance of Sunday. He always took Isa twice to church, and she went because she wanted to go; he did not believe in forcing children in such matters, but he made a point of slipping some interesting little book in his pocket, so in case she got tired, or the sermon was beyond her, she would have something pleasant to do instead of staring idly about the church or falling asleep, which was just as bad. Another peculiarity, she tells us, was his habit of keeping seated at the entrance of the choir. He contended that the rising of the congregation made the choir-boys conceited.
One could go on telling anecdotes of Lewis Carroll and this well-beloved child, but of a truth his own letters will show far better than any description how he regarded this “star” child of his. So far as her acting went, he never spared either praise or criticism where he thought it just. Here is a letter criticising her acting as the little Duke of York: