"Isa, my darling," he would say, "once upon a time there was some one 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!" Bob the Bat had many adventures. There was no way of controlling the direction of its flight, and one morning, a hot summer's morning when the window was wide open, Bob flew out into the garden and alighted in a bowl of salad which a scout was taking to some one's rooms. The poor fellow was so startled by the sudden flapping apparition that he dropped the bowl, and it was broken into a thousand pieces. There! I have written "a thousand pieces," and a thoughtless exaggeration of that sort was a thing that Lewis Carroll hated. "A thousand pieces?" he would have said; "you know, Isa, that if the bowl had been broken into a thousand pieces they would each have been so tiny that you could have hardly seen them." And if the broken pieces had been get-at-able, he would have made me count them as a means of impressing on my mind the folly of needless exaggeration. I remember how annoyed he was once 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 it on 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 that 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." That, and all the other pictures that he drew for me are, I'm sorry to say, the sole property of the little fishes in the Irish Channel, where a clumsy porter dropped them as we hurried into the boat at Holyhead. "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. Below you will find the letter that he wrote in return, written in violet ink that he always used (dreadfully ugly, I used to think it). [Illustration] "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 2 millions at least. 20)2,000,000 hugs and kisses 60)100,000 minutes 12)1,666 hours 6)138 days (at twelve hours a day) 23 weeks.