The Hunting of the Snark favourite young friends; in a typical fashion, he signed them with short poems, many of them acrostics of the child's name. He dedicated "The Hunting of the Snark" to Chataway, whom he had befriended in summer 1875 at the English seaside town Sandown on the Isle of Wight. He finished the dedication a month after befriending her, a double acrostic poem that not only spelled out her name, but contained a syllable of her name in the first line of each stanza. The stanza of his first draft concluded ""Rest on a friendly knee, the tale to ask / That
Lewis Carroll early version of what today is known as Scrabble. He appears to have invented – or at least certainly popularized – the "doublet" (see word ladder), a form of brain-teaser that is still popular today, changing one word into another by altering one letter at a time, each successive change always resulting in a genuine word. For instance, CAT is transformed into DOG by the following steps: CAT, COT, DOT, DOG. The games and puzzles of Lewis Carroll were the subject of Martin Gardner's March 1960 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Other items include a rule for finding the