He informed my wife that she was the most privileged woman in the world, for she knew the man who knew his (Lewis Carroll's) ideas--that ought to content her. She must not _see_ a picture or read a line of the MS.; it was sufficient for her to gaze at me outside of my studio with admiration and respect, as the only man besides Lewis Carroll himself with a knowledge of Lewis Carroll's forthcoming work. Furthermore he sent me an elaborate document to sign committing myself to secrecy. This I indignantly declined to sign. "My word was as good as my bond," I said, and, striking an attitude, I hinted that I would "strike," inasmuch as I would not work for years isolated from my wife and friends. I was therefore no doubt looked upon by him as a lunatic. That was what I wanted. I was allowed to show my wife the drawings, and he wrote: "For my own part I have shown _none_ of the MS. to anybody; and, though I have let some special friends see the pictures, I have uniformly declined to _explain_ them. 'May I ask so-and-so?' they enquire. 'Certainly!' I reply; "you may _ask_ as many questions as you like!' That is all they get out of me." But his egotism carried him still further. He was determined no one should read his MS. but he and I; so in the dead of night (he sometimes wrote up to 4 a.m.) he cut his MS. into horizontal strips of four or five lines, then placed the whole of it in a sack and shook it up; taking out piece by piece, he pasted the strips down as they happened to come. The result, in such an MS., dealing with nonsense on one page and theology on another, was audacious in the extreme, if not absolutely profane--for example: "And I found myself repeating, as I left the Church, the words of Jacob, when he '_awaked out of his sleep_,' surely the Lord is in this. "And once more those shrill discordant tones rang out:-- "'He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk Descending from a bus; He looked again, and found it was-- A Hippopotamus.'" These incongruous strips were elaborately and mysteriously marked with numbers and letters and various hieroglyphics, to decipher which would really have turned my assumed eccentricity into positive madness. I therefore sent the whole MS. back to him, and again threatened to strike! This had the desired effect. I then received MS. I could read, although frequently puzzled by its being mixed up with Euclid and problems in abstruse mathematics. I soon discovered that I had undertaken a far more difficult task than I anticipated, for in the first letter of instructions I received from the author he frankly acknowledged I had my work "cut out." "Cut out" suggests dressmaking, the very subject first chosen for discussion and correspondence. The extraordinary workings of this unique mind are shown by quotations from his letters to me: