Alice in Wonderland

Alice was sitting beside her sister on a grassy bank one hot afternoon, sleepy and bored. Her sister’s book had no pictures and no conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

Suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran past, saying to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” It took a watch out of its waistcoat pocket and hurried on. Alice ran after it and saw it pop down a rabbit hole under the hedge.

In another moment down went Alice after it, never once wondering how in the world she would get out again.

She fell for a long time, down what seemed a very deep well, and landed in a long, low hall with doors all round it, every one of them locked.

On a glass table lay a tiny golden key. It opened a little door only fifteen inches high, and through it Alice saw the loveliest garden, full of bright flowers and cool fountains. But she could not even get her head through.

Back on the table stood a bottle labelled DRINK ME. It was not marked “poison”, so Alice drank it all.

“What a curious feeling!” said Alice. “I must be shutting up like a telescope.”

Now she was only ten inches high. But she had left the key up on the table, the glass legs were too slippery to climb, and the poor little thing sat down and cried.

Under the table she found a tiny cake marked EAT ME. She ate it, and soon cried, “Curiouser and curiouser!” She grew to more than nine feet tall, and the garden was more hopeless than ever. She cried until a great pool of tears spread all round her.

The White Rabbit hurried past with white gloves and a fan, muttering, “Oh! The Duchess! Won’t she be furious if I’ve kept her waiting!” When Alice spoke to him, he dropped them both and ran.

Alice fanned herself. “If I’m not the same as I was this morning, who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” Even a poem she knew by heart came out all wrong:

How doth the little crocodileImprove his shining tail,And pour the waters of the NileOn every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,How neatly spreads his claws,And welcomes little fishes inWith gently smiling jaws!

“Those aren’t the right words,” said poor Alice. “I must have been changed for Mabel, who knows hardly anything! Oh, I am so very tired of being all alone here!”

Then she saw she was shrinking again, because of the fan! She dropped it just in time, but the little door was shut again and the key out of reach. Her foot slipped, and splash! She was up to her chin in salt water.

“I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” said Alice. “Now I suppose I’ll be drowned in my own tears!”

A Mouse and many other creatures had fallen in too. They all swam ashore and ran a Caucus-race to get dry, which everybody won. But when Alice boasted of how her cat Dinah caught mice and birds, they all hurried home.

Back came the White Rabbit. “Why, Mary Ann,” he called crossly, “run home and fetch me my gloves and a fan!” He had taken her for his housemaid! Alice was too startled to explain.

In his house she found the gloves and fan, and a bottle with no label. “Something interesting always happens when I eat or drink anything,” she thought, and drank. She grew until one arm was out of the window and one foot up the chimney.

Outside, the Rabbit’s servants sent Bill the Lizard down the chimney, and Alice gave one sharp kick. “There goes Bill!” cried everyone, as he shot up like a rocket.

Then pebbles came rattling in at the window and turned into little cakes on the floor. “If they can’t make me any larger, they must make me smaller,” thought Alice. She ate one, shrank at once, and ran out into a thick wood.

Her plan was to grow back to her right size and then find that lovely garden, only she had no idea how.

Soon she came to a mushroom as tall as herself. On top sat a large blue Caterpillar, smoking a hookah. At last it said, in a slow, sleepy voice, “Who are you?”

“I hardly know, sir, just at present,” Alice replied shyly. “I knew who I was when I got up this morning, but I must have been changed several times since then.”

When Alice said that three inches was a wretched height to be, the Caterpillar, who was exactly three inches high, was most offended. Then it crawled away, saying, “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.”

“One side of what?” thought Alice.

“Of the mushroom,” said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud, and it was gone.

Alice broke off a piece from each side. One made her shrink so fast that her chin hit her foot; the other shot her neck up above the trees, where a Pigeon screamed at her, “Serpent!” By nibbling carefully at each in turn, she got back to her usual height, and she kept both pieces.

At a little house she nibbled herself down to nine inches and went into a kitchen full of smoke and pepper. The Duchess sat nursing a baby, the cook stirred the soup, and everyone was sneezing except the cook and a large cat on the hearth, grinning from ear to ear.

“Why does your cat grin like that?” asked Alice.

“It’s a Cheshire cat,” said the Duchess, “and that’s why. Pig!” She meant the baby.

Suddenly the cook began throwing pans and plates about. The Duchess took no notice and sang the baby a rough lullaby, shaking it hard at the end of every line:

Speak roughly to your little boy,And beat him when he sneezes:He only does it to annoy,Because he knows it teases.Wow! wow! wow!

Then came the second verse, with the cook and the baby howling the chorus:

I speak severely to my boy,I beat him when he sneezes;For he can thoroughly enjoyThe pepper when he pleases!Wow! wow! wow!

“Here! You may nurse it a bit!” said the Duchess, tossing the baby to Alice. “I must get ready for the Queen’s croquet.”

Alice carried the baby outside to keep it safe, but it kept grunting, its nose turned into a snout, and at last there was no mistake: it was a pig. Alice set it down, and it trotted off into the wood.

Then she saw the Cheshire Cat grinning on a branch. “Would you tell me, please,” she asked, “which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where,” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. “That way lives a Hatter, and that way lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” said Alice.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad, or you wouldn’t have come here. You’ll see me at the Queen’s croquet.” It vanished, then came back. “By the way, what became of the baby?”

“It turned into a pig,” said Alice.

“I thought it would,” said the Cat, and this time it vanished slowly, beginning with the end of its tail and ending with its grin, which stayed some time after the rest of it had gone.

“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice, “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw!”

At the March Hare’s house, he and the Hatter were having tea under a tree, with a Dormouse asleep between them. “No room! No room!” they cried when they saw Alice.

“There’s plenty of room!” said Alice, and sat down.

“Why is a raven like a writing desk?” asked the Hatter. Alice gave up. The Hatter had no idea either.

“What a waste of time, riddles with no answers,” sighed Alice.

“If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.” He had quarrelled with Time at the Queen’s concert, where he sang:

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!How I wonder what you’re at!

“It goes on like this, you know,” said the Hatter.

Up above the world you fly,Like a tea tray in the sky.

“I’d hardly finished the first verse,” he went on, “when the Queen shouted, ‘He’s murdering the time! Off with his head!’ Ever since then, Time won’t do a thing I ask. It’s always six o’clock now, always teatime, so we just keep moving round the table.”

At last the Hatter was so rude that Alice walked off in disgust. “It’s the stupidest tea party I ever was at in all my life!”

Then she found a door in a tree that led back into the long hall. “Now, I’ll manage better this time,” she said. She took the golden key first and unlocked the little door, then nibbled her mushroom and grew to a foot high, and walked at last into the beautiful garden.

Near the entrance three gardeners, flat as playing cards, were painting white roses red. “It should have been a red rose tree, Miss,” one whispered, “and if the Queen finds out, she’ll have our heads cut off!” Then someone cried, “The Queen! The Queen!” and they threw themselves flat on their faces.

In came a grand procession of cards, and last of all, the King and Queen of Hearts.

When the Queen asked her name, Alice answered politely, but she thought, “Why, they’re only a pack of cards, after all. I needn’t be afraid of them!”

“And who are these?” asked the Queen, pointing at the gardeners.

“How should I know?” said Alice, surprised at her own courage. “It’s no business of mine.”

The Queen turned crimson with fury and screamed, “Off with her head!”

“Nonsense!” said Alice, very loudly, and the Queen fell silent.

Then the Queen saw the painted roses and cried, “Off with their heads!” But Alice hid the gardeners in a flower pot, and the soldiers never found them.

Then came the croquet. The balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets were live flamingos, and the soldiers bent over to make the hoops. Everybody played at once, and the Queen stamped about shouting “Off with his head!” or “Off with her head!” about once a minute.

Soon the Cheshire Cat’s head appeared in the air, grin first. “Off with his head!” said the Queen. But the executioner said you can’t cut off a head with no body to cut it from, and while they argued, the head quietly faded away.

The Duchess was there too, much sweeter now. “Maybe it’s pepper that makes people bad-tempered,” thought Alice. But one frown from the Queen, and the Duchess was gone.

The Queen kept sentencing players until nobody was free except the King, the Queen and Alice. But as they walked away, Alice heard the King say quietly, “You are all pardoned.”

The Queen sent Alice off with a Gryphon to meet the Mock Turtle. “What fun!” the Gryphon chuckled, once the Queen had gone. “It’s all her fancy, that. They never executes nobody, you know.”

The Mock Turtle sat on a rock, sighing as if his heart would break. “Once,” he said, “I was a real Turtle.” Then he and the Gryphon danced the Lobster Quadrille round her while he sang:

Will you walk a little faster? said a whiting to a snail,There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail.

After that, choking with sobs, he sang:

Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,Waiting in a hot tureen!Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

Before he could finish, a cry came: “The trial’s beginning!” The Gryphon took Alice by the hand and ran, and behind them the sad song faded away:

Soup of the evening,Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

The King and Queen sat on their throne, with the Knave of Hearts before them in chains and a dish of tarts on a table. Bill the Lizard sat among the twelve jurors. The White Rabbit blew his trumpet and read:

The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,All on a summer day:The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,And took them quite away!

The first witness was the Hatter. When the Queen sent for the list of singers at that concert, he trembled so much that he shook his shoes off, and fled before she could have his head taken off.

Just then Alice felt herself growing larger again, all by herself, though she had not eaten or drunk a thing.

Then the White Rabbit called out the next witness, in his shrill little voice, “Alice!”

“Here!” cried Alice, forgetting how big she had grown. She jumped up so fast that she knocked over the jury box and had to put all the jurors back, Bill upside down at first.

The King read from his notebook, “Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court.” Everybody looked at Alice.

“I’m not a mile high,” said Alice. “And that’s not a real rule. You invented it just now.”

“It’s the oldest rule in the book,” said the King.

“Then it ought to be Number One,” said Alice, and the King turned pale.

Next the White Rabbit produced some verses, just found, unsigned and not in the Knave’s handwriting:

I gave her one, they gave him two,You gave us three or more;They all returned from him to you,Though they were mine before.

“If he didn’t sign it,” said the King, “he must have meant mischief. An honest man would have signed his name.”

“That proves his guilt,” said the Queen.

“It proves nothing of the sort!” said Alice, who was not a bit afraid now. “I don’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it.”

“Let the jury consider their verdict,” said the King.

“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first, verdict afterwards.”

“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”

“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.

“I won’t!” said Alice.

“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.

“Who cares for you?” said Alice, for she had grown to her full size by now. “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

At this the whole pack rose up into the air and came flying down on her. She gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and found herself lying on the bank with her head in her sister’s lap, while her sister brushed some dead leaves from her face.

“Wake up, Alice dear!” said her sister. “What a long sleep you’ve had!”

“Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!” said Alice, and she told her sister all about it. “Now run in to your tea, dear,” said her sister, kissing her. “It’s getting late.” So Alice ran off, thinking what a wonderful dream it had been.

Her sister stayed on, watching the sun go down, and began to dream a little herself. She heard the White Rabbit in the grass, the rattling teacups, the Queen’s shrill voice and the Mock Turtle’s sobs, and knew that when she opened her eyes they would be only the wind, the sheep bells, the shepherd boy and the cattle lowing far away.

Last of all, she pictured her little sister grown up, still keeping the simple, loving heart of her childhood, and telling other little children many a strange tale, perhaps even the dream of Wonderland, as she remembered the happy summer days.