GLOVES FOR KITTENS[43]
Oh, you naughty, naughty little culprit!
If only I could fly to Fulham with a handy little stick (ten feet long and four inches thick is my favourite size) how I would rap your wicked little knuckles. However, there isn’t much harm done, so I will sentence you to a very mild punishment—only one year’s imprisonment. If you’ll just tell the Fulham policeman about it, he’ll manage all the rest for you, and he’ll fit you with a nice comfortable pair of handcuffs, and lock you up in a nice cosy dark cell, and feed you on nice dry bread and delicious cold water.
But how badly you do spell your words! I was so puzzled about the “sack full of love and basket full of kisses!” But at last I made out why, of course, you meant “a sack full of gloves, and a basket full of kittens!”
Then I understood what you were sending me. And just then Mrs. Dyer came to tell me a large sack and a basket had come. There was such a miawing in the house, as if all the cats in Eastbourne had come to see me!
“Oh, just open them please, Mrs. Dyer, and count the things in them.”
So in a few minutes Mrs. Dyer came and said “500 pairs of gloves in the sack and 250 kittens in the basket.”
“Dear me! That makes 1,000 gloves! four times as many gloves as kittens! It’s very kind of Maggie, but why did she send so many gloves? for I haven’t got 1,000 hands, you know, Mrs. Dyer.”
And Mrs. Dyer said, “No, indeed, you’re 998 hands short of that.”
However, the next day I made out what to do, and I took the basket with me and walked off to the parish school—the girls’ school, you know—and I said to the mistress:
“How many little girls are there at school to-day?”
“Exactly 250, sir.”
“And have they all been very good, all day?”
“As good as gold, sir.”
I waited outside the door with my basket, and as each little girl came out, I just popped a soft little kitten into her hands! Oh! what joy there was! The little girls went all dancing home, nursing their kittens, and the whole air was full of purring! Then, the next morning, I went to the school, before it opened, to ask the little girls how the kittens had behaved in the night. And they all arrived sobbing and crying, and their faces and hands were all covered with scratches, and they had the kittens wrapped up in their pinafores to keep them from scratching any more. And they sobbed out, “The kittens have been scratching us all night, all the night!”
So then I said to myself, “What a nice little girl Maggie is. Now I see why she sent all those gloves, and why there are four times as many gloves as kittens!” And I said to the little girls, “Never mind, my dear children, do your lessons very nicely, and don’t cry any more, and when school is over, you’ll find me at the door, and you shall see what you shall see!”
So, in the evening, when the little girls came running out, with the kittens still wrapped up in their pinafores, there was I, at the door, with a big sack! And, as each little girl came out, I just popped into her hand two pairs of gloves! And each little girl unrolled her pinafore and took out an angry little kitten, spitting and snarling, with its claws sticking out like a hedgehog.
But it hadn’t time to scratch for, in one moment, it found all its four claws popped into nice soft warm gloves! And then the kittens got quite sweet-tempered and gentle, and began purring again.
So the little girls went dancing home again, and the next morning they came dancing back to school. The scratches were all healed, and they told me “The kittens have been good!”
“And when any kitten wants to catch a mouse, it just takes off one of its gloves; and if it wants to catch two mice; it takes off two gloves; and if it wants to catch three mice, it takes off three gloves; and if it wants to catch four mice, it takes off all its gloves. But the moment they’ve caught the mice, they pop their gloves on again, because they know we can’t love them without their gloves. For, you see, ‘gloves’ have got ‘love’ inside them—there’s none outside.”
So all the little girls said, “Please thank Maggie, and we send her 250 loves and 1,000 kisses in return for her 250 kittens and her 1,000 gloves!”
Your loving old Uncle,
C. L. D.
Love and kisses to Nellie and Emsie.
[43] This whimsical and characteristic paper, which has never been published before, is from a letter written by Lewis Carroll on September 17, 1893, from 7, Lushington Road, Eastbourne, to Miss Maggie Bowman.