Shanghai, Mar. 6—Looking out of my window this morning, I saw a Rook sitting alone n a Poplar tree with its feathers fluffed, its neck hunched up into its shoulders, and its bill held downwards in an attitude of dejection: "this; I said to myself," "must be the original of Lewis Carrol's missy Borogove" so I picked up a copy of Alice, and this is what T found. The line in the poem is "All missy were the borogoves," and the author later explains (per Humpty Dumpty) that the word missy is a mixture of flimsy and miserable; while a Borogove is a "thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round—something like a live mop"....and this brings me to a very interesting point. John Tenniel who did the illustrations is said to have based all his caricatures on things which were familiar to ihe eye (and strangely enough he only had one eye) and while I am prepared to say that his Borogove looks something like an African Marabou-stork, or an Indian Adjutant, it hardly seems. likely that Tenniel could have been familiar with such birds. Again, reverting to the Jabberwock poem, this dangerous animal is described in Verse 3 as a "Manxome foe," and although the author's explanations do not go beyond Verse 1, it is obvious that manzome must indicate that the Jabberwork had no tail at all, or at most a very short one; yet Tenniel drew it with a very long tail, thus proving that it was a composite animal....just as the "slithy
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.