He may think himself lucky if he gets his meals at any time,' said the Queen heartily, and clapped her hands.
'May I send a letter ?' asked Cyril, pulling out a red-backed penny account-book, and feeling in his pockets for a stump of pencil that he knew was in one of them.
'By all means.

I'll call my scribe.' 'Oh, I can scribe right enough, thanks,' said Cyril, finding the pencil and licking its point.

He even had to bite the wood a little, for it was very blunt.
'Oh, you clever, clever boy!' said the Queen.

'DO let me watch you do it!' Cyril wrote on a leaf of the book--it was of rough, woolly paper, with hairs that stuck out and would have got in his pen if he had been using one, and ruled for accounts.
'Hide IT most carefully before you come here,' he wrote, 'and don't mention it--and destroy this letter.

Everything is going A1.