LEVEL: Psyche

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) - you have been me all along

She had been sitting on the bank for some time and the day had grown hot and the sitting had grown long, and the only book within reach belonged to her sister and had neither pictures nor conversations in it. Alice's objection to that arrangement was of a piece with her objections to most arrangements that summer: it was not so much that the book was bad as that it was silent, and a book that cannot talk back is not, strictly speaking, a companion. She had looked into it once or twice to confirm this, and had confirmed it, and had gone back to the question of whether a chain of daisies would be worth the trouble of rising to gather them. This was the whole of her thinking, and it was not enough to hold her. The heat did the rest. Her eyelids got heavy in the particular way that precedes not sleep but a kind of half-witness to everything, in which the world goes on being real and one is simply no longer being addressed by it.

Then a white rabbit ran past her, close by, with pink eyes.

There is nothing in that. Rabbits run. The day was hot and the rabbit was going somewhere. What made the event of a different order was the voice. The rabbit said, to itself, clearly, in an ordinary voice, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” And even then, Alice thought afterwards, nothing need have followed, because a rabbit may talk if it likes. It was the second thing that did the damage. The rabbit took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, looked at it, and hurried on.

She was on her feet before she had decided to be. She had never seen a rabbit with a waistcoat-pocket. She had never seen a watch come out of one. She ran across the field after it without any clear plan, and was in time to see it drop down a large hole under the hedge.

She went in after it.

There was no moment in which she considered the question of how she would get out. That consideration, when it arrived at all, arrived later and belonged to somebody else. What she had at the moment was curiosity, and curiosity is a force that does not consult the owner. Down she went.

The passage went straight on like a tunnel for a while, and then dipped so suddenly that she had no time at all to decide upon stopping before she was falling down a well. And then the most unusual thing about the fall, which she had time to notice as it went on, was that it was slow. Either the well was very deep or she was falling very gently, and either way she had an enormous quantity of time in which to look about her and to wonder what was coming next. This is worth pausing on, because the whole of what follows depends upon it. A fast fall is an event. A slow fall is an interval, and an interval can be inhabited. She was falling through four thousand miles of air with her hands free.

She tried to look down first and could see nothing, because it was too dark. She looked at the walls instead and found them lined with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there were maps and pictures hung on pegs. She took down a jar as she passed. It was labelled ORANGE MARMALADE and it was empty. She did not like the idea of dropping it, because of what might be underneath, so she put it into one of the cupboards as she went past, which is the sort of decision that is only available to somebody who is falling and has time to be careful.

“Well!” she said to herself. “After such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they’ll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!”

The parenthesis in which she added that this was very likely true was the whole of her self-correction, and it is the model for everything that follows: the observation is made at full strength and then, in the same breath, quietly withdrawn. She is not lying and she is not believing. She is a witness whose instrument is fluctuating.

Down, down, down. She began to work out where she was going. The centre of the earth, she calculated, would be about four thousand miles down, and she had learnt that figure, or something like it, in a schoolroom, and she said it aloud for practice because there was nobody there to hear the practice. Then she began to wonder what latitude and longitude she was getting to. She had no real notion of either term but she liked the sound of them and said so.

“Presently she began again. “I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward! The Antipathies, I think—” she added, “—but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma’am, is this New Zealand or Australia?”

And she tried to curtsey as she said it, which she was aware was not a thing one can do in mid-air.

“Oh dear, what nonsense I’m talking!”

Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so she talked. Dinah would miss her. Dinah was the cat. Somebody ought to remember Dinah's saucer of milk at tea-time, and nobody would. She wished Dinah were down here with her, though there were no mice in the air, only bats, and a bat is very like a mouse, and she was not sure that a cat would take the substitution kindly. Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats. And sometimes, because she could not answer the question either way round and it made no difference which way she put it, do bats eat cats. The syllables went soft. She felt herself going under.

She dreamed, or very nearly dreamed, that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, saying earnestly: “Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?” And then, with no interval at all between the question and the answer, thump, thump, and she came down onto a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.

She was not hurt. She got up on her feet at once. Above her it was entirely dark; in front of her was a long passage, and the White Rabbit was still in sight, hurrying away down it. There was no time to lose. She went after it like wind and was just in time to hear it say, as it turned a corner, “Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it’s getting!” She was close behind it when it turned, and then it was not there, and she was standing in a long low hall lit by a row of lamps hanging from the roof.

There were doors all round the hall. They were all locked. She went the whole length of one side and the whole length of the other, trying every one, and then walked down the middle of the floor in a manner that has been described since as sad, and wondered how she was ever to get out.

In the middle of the hall, on a little three-legged table made of solid glass, there was a tiny golden key.

This is the first of the two objects that will govern her, and the arrangement should be stated plainly, because everything in this account is an arrangement. There is a table. There is a key. The key is too small for the doors. The hall contains a door that will take the key, and that door is fifteen inches high, and behind it is a garden. She had already walked past that door once and had not seen it. She found it on the second circuit, behind a low curtain she had not noticed before. She knelt and put the little golden key in the lock and it fitted.

Beyond it was a passage about the size of a rat-hole, and at the end of the passage was the loveliest garden she had ever seen. Beds of bright flowers, cool fountains, a great deal of light.

She could not get her head through the doorway.

That is the whole of the trouble, and it should not be hurried past, because it is the trouble that the rest of the book is about. She wanted the garden very much. She could see it from where she knelt. She could not enter it, and the reason she could not enter it was the size and shape of her own body, which was not, at that moment, adjustable by any argument. “And even if my head would go through,” she thought, “it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.”

And then the sentence that the whole book turns on, and she says it without any idea that she is saying it: “For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.”

Waiting by the little door did not appear to be productive, so she went back to the glass table to see whether a second key had appeared, or at least a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes. There was a bottle.

It had not been there before; she noted that it had not been there before, which is a considerable observation in a place where nothing keeps still. Round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, and on it, printed in large letters, DRINK ME.

She was not a child who drinks things labelled. That was the point of her. She had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, and the common factor in all of those histories was a failure to remember a simple rule that a friend had taught them. She could still recite the rules: a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife it usually bleeds; and if you drink much from a bottle marked poison it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.

So she looked first. She looked specifically to see whether it was marked poison.

It was not marked poison.

She tasted it, and found it very nice. It had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast. She very soon finished it off.

The first thing she noticed was not the change itself but the sensation of the change, which she described as curious rather than frightening. “I must be shutting up like a telescope.” And she was: she was now ten inches high.

The next thing she did was the next thing a person does when handed a new instrument, which is to test its limits. She waited several minutes to see whether the shrinking would continue, and the waiting was not idle, because she was frightened that it might continue to completion. It might end, she thought, in her going out altogether, like a candle. And she tried to imagine what a candle is like after the candle is blown out, and could not remember ever having seen such a thing.

Nothing further happened. She decided to go into the garden at once.

She got to the door and found that she had forgotten the little golden key. She went back to the table for it and found that she could not reach it. She could see it perfectly well through the glass. She tried to climb up one of the table legs, and the leg was too slippery, and she tired herself out trying, and then the poor little thing sat down on the floor of the hall and cried.

“Come, there’s no use in crying like that!” said Alice to herself, rather sharply. “I advise you to leave off this minute!”

It is worth noting exactly what happened here, because it is the first working of a device that runs the entire book. She was alone. She gave herself advice. She did not take it. The person who gave the advice and the person who received it were the same person, and this person had “generally given herself very good advice, though she very seldom followed it.” On one occasion she had scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes, and once — this is given as a matter of course, as an amusing detail — she remembered boxing her own ears for cheating herself at a game of croquet that she was playing against herself. She was fond of pretending to be two people.

She wanted to be two people now. She could not be. “But it’s no use now,” she thought, “to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!”

Ten inches high, crying, alone, in a hall. Her eye fell on a little glass box lying under the table. In it was a very small cake, and on the cake, marked out in currants, were the words EAT ME.

“Well, I’ll eat it,” said Alice, “and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I’ll get into the garden, and I don’t care which happens!”

She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, “Which way? Which way?”, holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was going. She was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size. To be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.

That is the first correct description of the mechanism and she does not pursue it. The cake is the same cake as any cake. What is different is not the substance but the reader's position. She has spent her life in a world where an unlabelled cake is a cake. Here it is a small cake with a word on it, and the word is an instruction, and the instruction is being obeyed by the body rather than received by the mind.

So she set to work and very soon finished off the cake.

And then came the sentence that has outlived the century that produced it: “Curiouser and curiouser!” She was so surprised that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English. “Now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!”

And she looked down at her feet, which were almost out of sight, they were getting so far off.

“Oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now, dears? I’m sure I shan’t be able! I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble myself about you: you must manage the best way you can;—but I must be kind to them,” thought Alice, “or perhaps they won’t walk the way I want to go! Let me see: I’ll give them a new pair of boots every Christmas.”

And she went on planning how it would be done. “They must go by the carrier,” she thought; “and how funny it’ll seem, sending presents to one’s own feet! And how odd the directions will look!

Alice’s Right Foot, Esq., Hearthrug, near the Fender, (with Alice’s love).

Oh dear, what nonsense I’m talking!”

The size change is not a metaphor in this account and it should not be allowed to become one. She grows. It is not that she feels powerful or diminished; it is that the distance between her head and her feet becomes a quantity she has to plan around. Her feet are a logistical problem. Her feet are in a different postal district. And she is still, at this point, entirely herself — she notices the change, she is delighted by it, she jokes about it, she remains in command of the joke. Nothing has been taken from her. Something has been done to her, and she is the one doing it, and she does not know that.

Her head struck against the roof of the hall. She was now more than nine feet high. At once she took up the little golden key and hurried off to the garden door.

It was as much as she could do, lying down on one side, to look through into the garden with one eye.

Being nine feet high is not a problem of imagination. It is a problem of joints, of the angle at which the neck can be turned, of the eye's line of sight, of how long it takes to cross a room, of what happens when you try to lie down. She could see the garden. She could not be in the garden, because the garden was behind a door fifteen inches high, and the girl who was nine feet tall could not be fifteen inches. She sat down and began to cry again.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Alice, “a great girl like you, to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you!”

And she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep and reaching half down the hall.

Four inches deep. The figure is exact and it is the only measurement in the book that is given with any precision, and it is the only liquid that is ever measured. She wept gallons. There was no arithmetic problem here — she was nine feet tall, and a nine-foot-tall person crying on the floor of a long hall will make a great deal of fluid — but the four inches is the point. The depth is not proportional to her size. It is a depth. It will be swimmable by things the size of a mouse. She has, without intending it, made a body of water in a place that had none, and the water is the right depth for her grief and not for her size.

She wept because she could not get into the garden. That is the entire content of the emotion. She was not grieving for anything; she was grieving because a door was too small.

After a time she heard a pattering of feet in the distance, and hastily dried her eyes to see what was coming. It was the White Rabbit returning, splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid gloves in one hand and a large fan in the other. He came trotting along in a great hurry, muttering to himself as he came, “Oh! the Duchess, the Duchess! Oh! won’t she be savage if I’ve kept her waiting!”

Alice felt so desperate that she was ready to ask help of anyone; so, when the Rabbit came near her, she began, in a low, timid voice, “If you please, sir—”

The Rabbit started violently, dropped the white kid gloves and the fan, and skurried away into the darkness as hard as he could go.

She took up the fan and gloves. The hall was very hot. She kept fanning herself all the time she went on talking, and this is where the second mechanism enters, and it enters through an object she picked up without thinking, from a rabbit she has just frightened.

“Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle!”

And then she began, in earnest, to go through the children she knew who were of her own age, to see if she could have been changed for any of them.

This is the passage on which the level turns, and it deserves to be read as it stands rather than summarised. She is not asking whether she has changed. She is asking whether she has been *swapped* — whether some operation has taken one child and put another in her place, and left the body in a state of nine feet and the memory of a morning walk. She works through the candidates and eliminates them on evidence. “I’m sure I’m not Ada,” she said, “for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine doesn’t go in ringlets at all; and I’m sure I can’t be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh! she knows such a very little! Besides, she's she, and I'm I, and—oh dear, how puzzling it all is!”

Notice what “she's she, and I'm I” is doing. It is offered as the firmest thing she has. It is a tautology and she offers it as an axiom, and the tautology is in fact the whole of her case, and it is going to fail in the next four lines.

“I’ll try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate! However, the Multiplication Table doesn’t signify: let’s try Geography. London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome, and Rome—no, that's all wrong, I’m certain! I must have been changed for Mabel!”

She then folded her hands on her lap as if she were saying lessons and began to repeat, in her schoolroom voice, the verse she knew.

“How doth the little crocodile Improve his shining tail, And pour the waters of the Nile On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin, How neatly spread his claws, And welcome little fishes in With gently smiling jaws!”

And it did not come the same. The words came out, but the thing that was wrong could not be named, and it is important to be exact about that: the words were the correct words, in the correct order, and it was not the words. Her voice sounded hoarse and strange.

“I’m sure those are not the right words,” said poor Alice, and her eyes filled with tears again as she went on, “I must be Mabel after all, and I shall have to go and live in that poky little house, and have next to no toys to play with, and oh! ever so many lessons to learn! No, I’ve made up my mind about it; if I’m Mabel, I’ll stay down here! It’ll be no use their putting their heads down and saying ‘Come up again, dear!’ I shall only look up and say ‘Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else”—but, oh dear!” she cried, with a sudden burst of tears, “I do wish they would put their heads down! I am so very tired of being all alone here!”

That last sentence is the true one. She has not said what she is frightened of. She has said what she is tired of. She has offered to be Mabel indefinitely in exchange for not having to be alone, and she has said so before checking whether the offer is in anyone's power to accept.

And then, as she said this, she looked down at her hands, and was surprised to see that she had put on one of the Rabbit's little white kid gloves while she was talking. “How can I have done that?” she thought. “I must be growing small again.”

She got up and went to the table to measure herself by it, and found that, as nearly as she could guess, she was now about two feet high, and was going on shrinking rapidly. She soon found out that the cause of this was the fan she was holding, and she dropped it hastily, just in time to avoid shrinking away altogether.

“That was a narrow escape!” said Alice, a good deal frightened at the sudden change, but very glad to find herself still in existence; “and now for the garden!”

She ran back to the little door. It was shut again. The little golden key was lying on the glass table as before. “And things are worse than ever,” thought the poor child, “for I never was so small as this before, never! And I declare it’s too bad, that it is!”

And as she said these words her foot slipped, and in another moment, splash, she was up to her chin in salt water.

Her first idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, and in that case she could go back by railway. She had been to the seaside once in her life and had come to the general conclusion that wherever you go to on the English coast you find a number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and behind them a railway station. But she soon made out that she was in the pool of tears which she had wept when she was nine feet high.

“I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer to-day.”

Two feet high, in a pool four inches deep, in a hall, having wept the pool herself. She is not having a symbolic experience. She is in the water she made, at a size that makes her nearly an inch tall, and the water is salt because she is told so and she does not examine it. The register of the narration is worth noticing: the sea would have been salt and the pool of tears is salt, and the book does not distinguish them, because the distinction would require someone to notice that a thing has been made rather than found.

Just then she heard something splashing about in the pool a little way off, and swam nearer to make out what it was: at first she thought it must be a walrus or hippopotamus, but then she remembered how small she was now, and she soon made out that it was only a mouse that had slipped in like herself.

“Would it be of any use, now,” thought Alice, “to speak to this mouse? Everything is so out-of-the-way down here, that I should think very likely it can talk: at any rate, there’s no harm in trying.” She began: “O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O Mouse!”

And the parenthesis matters here, because she is aware that she is performing a form of address. She had never done such a thing before, but she remembered having seen in her brother's Latin Grammar, “A mouse—of a mouse—to a mouse—a mouse—O mouse!”

The Mouse looked at her rather inquisitively, and seemed to her to wink with one of its little eyes, but it said nothing.

“Perhaps it doesn’t understand English,” thought Alice; “I daresay it’s a French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror.”

And, for — with all her knowledge of history, Alice had no very clear notion how long ago anything had happened — she began again: “Où est ma chatte?”

Which was the first sentence in her French lesson-book.

The Mouse gave a sudden leap out of the water and seemed to quiver all over with fright. “Oh, I beg your pardon!” cried Alice hastily, afraid that she had hurt the poor animal’s feelings. “I quite forgot you didn’t like cats.”

“Not like cats!” cried the Mouse, in a shrill, passionate voice. “Would you like cats if you were me?”

This is the first conversation in the book, and it is worth noticing how completely it is a conversation about the wrong thing. Alice has asked for directions out of a pool. She is answered instead with a history of a wound. She does not register that she has been redirected; she registers that she has been asked a question about her own feelings, and she answers it, and the answering is what keeps them in the water.

“Well, perhaps not,” said Alice in a soothing tone: “don’t be angry about it. And yet I wish I could show you our cat Dinah: I think you’d take a fancy to cats if you could only see her. She is such a dear quiet thing,” Alice went on, half to herself, as she swam lazily about in the pool, “and she sits purring so nicely by the fire, licking her paws and washing her face—and she is such a nice soft thing to nurse—and she’s such a capital one for catching mice—oh, I beg your pardon!” cried Alice again, for this time the Mouse was bristling all over, and she felt certain it must be really offended. “We won’t talk about her any more if you’d rather not.”

“We indeed!” cried the Mouse, who was trembling down to the end of his tail. “As if I would talk on such a subject! Our family always hated cats: nasty, low, vulgar things! Don’t let me hear the name again!”

“I won’t indeed!” said Alice, in a great hurry to change the subject of conversation. “Are you—are you fond—of—of dogs?”

The Mouse did not answer, so Alice went on eagerly: “There is such a nice little dog near our house I should like to show you! A little bright-eyed terrier, you know, with oh, such long curly brown hair! And it’ll fetch things when you throw them, and it’ll sit up and beg for its dinner, and all sorts of things—I can’t remember half of them—and it belongs to a farmer, you know, and he says it’s so useful, it’s worth a hundred pounds! He says it kills all the rats and—oh dear!” she cried in a sorrowful tone, “I’m afraid I’ve offended it again!”

For the Mouse was swimming away from her as hard as it could go, and making quite a commotion in the pool as it went.

So she called softly after it, “Mouse dear! Do come back again, and we won’t talk about cats or dogs either, if you don’t like them!” And when the Mouse heard this, it turned round and swam slowly back to her: its face was quite pale (with passion, Alice thought), and it said in a low trembling voice, “Let us get to the shore, and then I’ll tell you my history, and you’ll understand why it is I hate cats and dogs.”

It was high time to go, for the pool was getting quite crowded with the birds and animals that had fallen into it: there were a Duck and a Dodo, a Lory and an Eaglet, and several other curious creatures. Alice led the way, and the whole party swam to the shore.

They were indeed a queer-looking party that assembled on the bank — the birds with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close to them, and all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable.

The first question of course was how to get dry again. They had a consultation about this, and after a few minutes it seemed quite natural to Alice to find herself talking familiarly with them, as if she had known them all her life. This is not a small thing. She has been in the pool an hour. She has had one conversation. She now belongs to the group, and the group treats her as a member, and she finds this agreeable. The circumstances of her admission are that she is the only one of them who was in the water before it existed.

She had quite a long argument with the Lory, who at last turned sulky and would only say, “I am older than you, and must know better;” and this Alice would not allow without knowing how old it was, and as the Lory positively refused to tell its age, there was no more to be said.

At last the Mouse, who seemed to be a person of authority among them, called out, “Sit down, all of you, and listen to me! I'll soon make you dry enough!” They all sat down at once in a large ring, with the Mouse in the middle. Alice kept her eyes anxiously fixed on it, for she felt sure she would catch a bad cold if she did not get dry very soon.

“Ahem!” said the Mouse with an important air, “are you all ready? This is the driest thing I know. Silence all round, if you please!”

And what follows is not a history at all. That is the joke, and it is the best joke in the first third of the book, and it works precisely because the Mouse has been established as a person of authority and does not deliver what a person of authority would deliver. He recites: “William the Conqueror, whose cause was favoured by the pope, was soon submitted to by the English, who wanted leaders, and had been of late much accustomed to usurpation and conquest. Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria—”

“Ugh!” said the Lory, with a shiver.

“I beg your pardon!” said the Mouse, frowning, but very politely: “Did you speak?”

“Not I!” said the Lory hastily.

“I thought you did,” said the Mouse. “—I proceed. ‘Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him: and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable—’”

“Found what?” said the Duck.

“Found it,” the Mouse replied rather crossly: “of course you know what ‘it’ means.”

“I know what ‘it’ means well enough, when I find a thing,” said the Duck: “it’s generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?”

The Mouse did not notice this question, but hurriedly went on, “‘—found it advisable to go with Edgar Atheling to meet William and offer him the crown. William’s conduct at first was moderate. But the insolence of his Normans—’ How are you getting on now, my dear?” it continued, turning to Alice as it spoke.

“As wet as ever,” said Alice in a melancholy tone: “it doesn’t seem to dry me at all.”

“In that case,” said the Dodo solemnly, rising to its feet, “I move that the meeting adjourn, for the immediate adoption of more energetic remedies—”

“Speak English!” said the Eaglet. “I don’t know the meaning of half those long words, and, what’s more, I don’t believe you do either!”

And the Eaglet bent down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly.

“What I was going to say,” said the Dodo in an offended tone, “was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.”

“What is a Caucus-race?” said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that somebody ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.

“Why,” said the Dodo, “the best way to explain it is to do it.”

And this, too, is the method of the whole book, stated by a bird, on a riverbank, by creatures who cannot get dry: the best way to explain a procedure is to perform it and let the observer infer the rules from the performance. There is no manual. The Mouse could not have recited the rules of dryness because there are none. The Caucus Race is the book.

First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (“the exact shape doesn’t matter,” it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no “One, two, three, and away,” but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out “The race is over!” and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, “But who has won?”

This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”

“But who is to give the prizes?” quite a chorus of voices asked.

“Why, she, of course,” said the Dodo, pointing to Alice with one finger; and the whole party at once crowded round her, calling out in a confused way, “Prizes! Prizes!”

Alice had no idea what to do, and in despair she put her hand in her pocket and pulled out a box of comfits — luckily the salt water had not got into it — and handed them round as prizes. There was exactly one a-piece, all round.

“But she must have a prize herself, you know,” said the Mouse.

“Of course,” the Dodo replied very gravely. “What else have you got in your pocket?” he went on, turning to Alice.

“Only a thimble,” said Alice sadly.

“Hand it over here,” said the Dodo.

Then they all crowded round her once more, while the Dodo solemnly presented the thimble, saying “We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble;” and, when it had finished this short speech, they all cheered.

Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything to say, she simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as she could.

She has been dry for half an hour, in exchange for a box of sweets she happened to have, and a thimble she did not want, given away by an authority she did not elect. She walked away from it carrying a prize conferred by an act that defined itself as the absence of any way of deciding who had deserved anything. This is the Caucus Race and it is also the trial, and it is also the looking-glass, and Alice will meet it three more times before the end.

The next thing was to eat the comfits: this caused some noise and confusion, as the large birds complained that they could not taste theirs, and the small ones choked and had to be patted on the back. However, it was over at last, and they sat down again in a ring, and begged the Mouse to tell them something more.

“You promised to tell me your history, you know,” said Alice, “and why it is you hate—C and D,” she added in a whisper, half afraid that it would be offended again.

“Mine is a long and a sad tale!” said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing.

“It is a long tail, certainly,” said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse’s tail; “but why do you call it sad?” And she kept on puzzling about it while the Mouse was speaking, so that her idea of the tale was something like this:—

“Fury said to a mouse, That he met in the house, ‘Let us both go to law: I will prosecute you.—Come, I’ll take no denial; We must have a trial: For really this morning I’ve nothing to do.’ Said the mouse to the cur, ‘Such a trial, dear sir, With no jury or judge, would be wasting our breath.’ ‘I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury,’ Said cunning old Fury: ‘I’ll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death.’”

“You are not attending!” said the Mouse to Alice severely. “What are you thinking of?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Alice very humbly: “you had got to the fifth bend, I think?”

“I had not!” cried the Mouse, sharply and very angrily.

“A knot!” said Alice, always ready to make herself useful, and looking anxiously about her. “Oh, do let me help to undo it!”

“I shall do nothing of the sort,” said the Mouse, getting up and walking away. “You insult me by talking such nonsense!”

“I didn’t mean it!” pleaded poor Alice. “But you’re so easily offended, you know!”

The Mouse only growled in reply.

“Please come back and finish your story!” Alice called after it; and the others all joined in chorus, “Yes, please do!” but the Mouse only shook its head impatiently, and walked a little quicker.

“What a pity it wouldn’t stay!” sighed the Lory, as soon as it was quite out of sight; and an old Crab took the opportunity of saying to her daughter “Ah, my dear! Let this be a lesson to you never to lose your temper!” “Hold your tongue, Ma!” said the young Crab, a little snappishly. “You’re enough to try the patience of an oyster!”

The Mouse's tale is the story of a defendant being judged by the party that has the power, in a court assembled by the accuser, with the accuser as judge and jury, and no defence available. Alice is told this story by the injured party, and then falls asleep in the middle of it, and misses the verdict entirely. That is the arrangement. The scene that ends the book is a courtroom with the same structure and a different cast, and Alice will be in the jury-box in it.

“I wish I had our Dinah here, I know I do!” said Alice aloud, addressing nobody in particular. “She’d soon fetch it back!”

“And who is Dinah, if I might venture to ask the question?” said the Lory.

Alice replied eagerly, for she was always ready to talk about her pet: “Dinah’s our cat. And she’s such a capital one for catching mice you can’t think! And oh, I wish you could see her after the birds! Why, she’ll eat a little bird as soon as look at it!”

This speech caused a remarkable sensation among the party. Some of the birds hurried off at once: one old Magpie began wrapping itself up very carefully, remarking, “I really must be getting home; the night-air doesn’t suit my throat!” and a Canary called out in a trembling voice to its children, “Come away, my dears! It’s high time you were all in bed!” On various pretexts they all moved off, and Alice was soon left alone.

The party dissolves because she mentions a cat. Nothing else is required. No argument is made, no threat issued, no counter-argument offered. She names a predator and every animal capable of being preyed upon leaves, and the Mouse's history — which she interrupted, and did not hear the end of — is abandoned without ceremony. She did not set out to clear the beach. She described her household.

“I wish I hadn’t mentioned Dinah!” she said to herself in a melancholy tone. “Nobody seems to like her, down here, and I’m sure she’s the best cat in the world! Oh, my dear Dinah! I wonder if I shall ever see you any more!”

And here poor Alice began to cry again, for she felt very lonely and low-spirited.

That is the second time in an afternoon that a creature has cried because it was alone, and the difference between the two occasions is the whole of the psychology of the level. The first was grief at a door too small. The second is grief at the consequences of conversation. She has learned, in the interval, that speech has effects in this place, and she has learned it by watching a room empty.

In a little while, however, she again heard a little pattering of footsteps in the distance, and she looked up eagerly, half hoping that the Mouse had changed his mind, and was coming back to finish his story.

It was the White Rabbit, trotting slowly back again, and looking anxiously about as it went, as if it had lost something; and she heard it muttering to itself “The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my dear paws! Oh my fur and whiskers! She’ll get me executed, as sure as ferrets are ferrets! Where can I have dropped them, I wonder?”

Alice guessed in a moment that it was looking for the fan and the pair of white kid gloves, and she very good-naturedly began hunting about for them, but they were nowhere to be seen. Everything seemed to have changed since her swim in the pool, and the great hall, with the glass table and the little door, had vanished completely.

This is worth pausing on, because it is a different mechanism again and it is the one she will not see clearly until the very end. The hall did not close. The hall was simply not there when she came back for it, and neither was the table, nor the key, nor the pool. The passage she walked in was warm and dry and led, after a little way, to a wood. She has been in a building. She is now outdoors. There was no threshold she crossed.

In a place where objects are replaced rather than moved, the natural inference — the inference a mind not being systematically deceived would make — is that she has gone somewhere else. And the effect of that inference is to make the earlier place unaccountable. She does not think “the hall has been taken away.” She thinks she must be somewhere else now. Which means that wherever she is, she is not accountable for how she got here, and cannot be held to any account of it.

Very soon the Rabbit noticed Alice, as she went hunting about, and called out to her in an angry tone, “Why, Mary Ann, what are you doing out here? Run home this moment, and fetch me a pair of gloves and a fan! Quick, now!”

And Alice was so much frightened that she ran off at once in the direction it pointed to, without trying to explain the mistake it had made.

“He took me for his housemaid,” she said to herself as she ran. “How surprised he’ll be when he finds out who I am! But I’d better take him his fan and gloves—that is, if I can find them.”

She is two feet high and she has just been handed an errand by a frightened animal, and the errand is to go into a house and retrieve objects she does not have, and she accepts it, and the reason she accepts it is that being somebody's housemaid is an answer to the question she has been asking since the fan: Who am I? Mary Ann is a name she can be. Alice is a name she has been unable to confirm. She takes the smaller certainty.

As she said this, she came upon a neat little house, on the door of which was a bright brass plate with the name “W. RABBIT,” engraved upon it. She went in without knocking, and hurried upstairs, in great fear lest she should meet the real Mary Ann, and be turned out of the house before she had found the fan and gloves.

“How queer it seems,” Alice said to herself, “to be going messages for a rabbit! I suppose Dinah’ll be sending me on messages next!” And she began fancying the sort of thing that would happen: “‘Miss Alice! Come here directly, and get ready for your walk!’ ‘Coming in a minute, nurse! But I’ve got to see that the mouse doesn’t get out.’ Only I don’t think,” Alice went on, “that they’d let Dinah stop in the house if it began ordering people about like that!”

By this time she had found her way into a tidy little room with a table in the window, and on it, as she had hoped, a fan and two or three pairs of tiny white kid gloves. She took up the fan and a pair of the gloves, and was just going to leave the room, when her eye fell upon a little bottle that stood near the looking-glass. There was no label this time with the words “DRINK ME,” but nevertheless she uncorked it and put it to her lips.

She notices that this bottle is unlabelled. That is the entire difference between this drink and the first one, and it is the difference that matters most in the book. The first bottle announced itself. This one does not. She drinks it anyway, and gives her reason, and the reason is that she is now a person who drinks bottles and expects things to happen: “I know something interesting is sure to happen,” she said to herself, “whenever I eat or drink anything; so I’ll just see what this bottle does. I do hope it’ll make me grow large again, for really I’m quite tired of being such a tiny little thing!”

That is a considerable change and she makes it in a single sentence without noticing it. An hour ago she checked for poison. Now she has a prior, formed by experience, that things will happen to her — and the prior is being treated as a law of nature. She is no longer a Victorian child with a memory of being warned about unmarked bottles. She is a body inside a process, and the process has a regularity, and she has sampled it often enough to call it a law. She expects to be operated on. The fact that she is looking forward to it is what has changed, and the looking forward is not noticed, because it arrives in the voice of a girl wishing to be less tiny.

It did so indeed, and much sooner than she had expected: before she had drunk half the bottle, she found her head pressing against the ceiling, and had to stoop to save her neck from being broken. She hastily put down the bottle, saying to herself “That’s quite enough—I hope I shan’t grow any more—As it is, I can’t get out at the door—I do wish I hadn’t drunk quite so much!”

Alas! it was too late to wish that! She went on growing, and growing, and very soon had to kneel down on the floor: in another minute there was not even room for this, and she tried the effect of lying down with one elbow against the door, and the other arm curled round her head. Still she went on growing, and, as a last resource, she put one arm out of the window, and one foot up the chimney, and said to herself “Now I can do no more, whatever happens. What will become of me?”

Luckily for Alice, the little magic bottle had now had its full effect, and she grew no larger. But still it was very uncomfortable, and as there seemed to be no sort of chance of her ever getting out of the room again, no wonder she felt unhappy.

The sequence of her body in that room is the whole of the physical vocabulary of the book and it should be given as a list, because it is a list and not a journey: head against ceiling — kneel on the floor — lie with one elbow against the door and the other arm curled round the head — one arm out of the window and one foot up the chimney. She is not moving through the room. She is being redistributed in it. The chimney is not a place she chose; it is the last square of the floor plan available to a body that has outgrown the room. And her last spoken thought before stopping is a question about her own continuity: “What will become of me?” not “what have they done to me,” not “how do I get out.” What will become of me.

“It was much pleasanter at home,” thought poor Alice, “when one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole—and yet—and yet—it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what can have happened to me! When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I’ll write one—but I’m grown up now,” she added in a sorrowful tone; “at least there’s no room to grow up any more here.”

There is the whole subject of the level in nine words. There ought to be a book written about me — and I will write one when I grow up — but I am already grown up, and being grown up means there is no room to become an adult. The reader has been told what this is about and told it by the child, and the sentence is delivered in the tone of a person discovering a rule of the housing market.

“But then,” thought Alice, “shall I never get any older than I am now? That’ll be a comfort, one way—never to be an old woman—but then—always to have lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn’t like that!”

“Oh, you foolish Alice!” she answered herself. “How can you learn lessons in here? Why, there’s hardly room for you, and no room at all for any lesson-books!”

And so she went on, taking first one side and then the other, and making quite a conversation of it altogether; but after a few minutes she heard a voice outside, and stopped to listen.

“Mary Ann! Mary Ann!” said the voice. “Fetch me my gloves this moment!” Then came a little pattering of feet on the stairs. Alice knew it was the Rabbit coming to look for her, and she trembled till she shook the house, quite forgetting that she was now about a thousand times as large as the Rabbit, and had no reason to be afraid of it.

This is the first time the fear is reported as a forgetting. Not as a mistake, not as a consequence, but as a forgetting — she is afraid of a rabbit the size of a beetle, and the reason given is that she has forgotten the arithmetic of her own body. She has not miscalculated her size. She has failed to hold the fact of her own size in mind while acting. The body is enormous and the self is the size it was at the party.

Presently the Rabbit came up to the door, and tried to open it; but, as the door opened inwards, and Alice’s elbow was pressed hard against it, that attempt proved a failure. Alice heard it say to itself “Then I’ll go round and get in at the window.”

“That you won’t!” thought Alice, and, after waiting till she fancied she heard the Rabbit just under the window, she suddenly spread out her hand, and made a snatch in the air. She did not get hold of anything, but she heard a little shriek and a fall, and a crash of broken glass, from which she concluded that it was just possible it had fallen into a cucumber-frame, or something of the sort.

Next came an angry voice — the Rabbit's — “Pat! Pat! Where are you?” And then a voice she had never heard before, “Sure then I’m here! Digging for apples, yer honour!”

This is the moment the book has been read for, and it can be stated flatly. She has put her hand out of a window, through a hole she has already made in a window, at a rabbit, and has closed it on the rabbit. She has crushed a living creature. It has made a noise. She has concluded from the noise and from a crash of glass that it has probably fallen into a cucumber-frame. She has not named what she has done, has not felt the weight of it, has not registered the hand as hers in any sense that carries moral weight; the hand was a giant hand that snatched, and something small shrieked, and glass broke. And she went straight on to the next event.

And then she did something else entirely. She said, out loud, to the rabbit and its companions, who are trying to work out what has just happened to their colleague Bill: “We must burn the house down!” said the Rabbit’s voice; and Alice called out as loud as she could, “If you do, I’ll set Dinah at you!”

There is a dead silence instantly, and Alice thought to herself, “I wonder what they will do next! If they had any sense, they’d take the roof off.”

It is worth sitting with this for a moment, because it is the hinge of the entire narrative. She has just threatened, from a position of absolute and unintentional power over the household, to set a cat on them. The cat is a fiction. She has not got a cat. She has not got anything except an arm. She has made a threat in a voice of total confidence, and the threat has worked, because the threat is the only thing in the scene that is coherent — it is the only sentence anyone present, human or animal, can act upon. And her own assessment of the situation is that they ought to take the roof off. She understands perfectly well what is happening. She has understood it since the cucumber-frame. She is not confused. She is a child who has just crushed a rabbit and is now, with the clearest possible head, working out how to remove a roof.

After a minute or two, they began moving about again, and Alice heard the Rabbit say, “A barrowful will do, to begin with.”

“A barrowful of what?” thought Alice; but she had not long to doubt, for the next moment a shower of little pebbles came rattling in at the window, and some of them hit her in the face. “I’ll put a stop to this,” she said to herself, and shouted out, “You’d better not do that again!” which produced another dead silence.

Alice noticed with some surprise that the pebbles were all turning into little cakes as they lay on the floor, and a bright idea came into her head. “If I eat one of these cakes,” she thought, “it’s sure to make some change in my size; and as it can’t possibly make me larger, it must make me smaller, I suppose.”

So she swallowed one of the cakes, and was delighted to find that she began shrinking directly. As soon as she was small enough to get through the door, she ran out of the house, and found quite a crowd of little animals and birds waiting outside. The poor little Lizard, Bill, was in the middle, being held up by two guinea-pigs, who were giving it something out of a bottle. They all made a rush at Alice the moment she appeared; but she ran off as hard as she could, and soon found herself safe in a thick wood.

And note the arithmetic she performs: as it can't possibly make me larger, it must make me smaller. She has been nine feet or more. She reasons correctly from her own size. The absurdity is not in her reasoning; it is in the fact that the premises of ordinary reasoning are being supplied to her by the behaviour of a rock. And she eats the cake because eating is what one does when a rock turns into a cake. She has found, in the middle of an assault, a resource. The assault has become a dispensary.

“The first thing I’ve got to do,” said Alice to herself, as she wandered about in the wood, “is to grow to my right size again; and the second thing is to find my way into that lovely garden. I think that will be the best plan.”

It sounded an excellent plan, no doubt, and very neatly and simply arranged; the only difficulty was, that she had not the smallest idea how to set about it.

She had a plan and no method. She had been in the book for an hour and a half and had collected three instructions, none of which were instructions: DRINK ME, EAT ME, and a mushroom she had not yet met. She has a body that changes on command and no idea what the command words are, and her plan requires her to be a particular size, and she has no vocabulary for asking for one. “Very few things indeed were really impossible” has been replaced, without her noticing the substitution, by “very few things are possible,” and the two sentences have the same grammar.

And while she was peering about anxiously among the trees, a little sharp bark just over her head made her look up in a great hurry.

An enormous puppy was looking down at her with large round eyes, and feebly stretching out one paw, trying to touch her. “Poor little thing!” said Alice, in a coaxing tone, and she tried hard to whistle to it; but she was terribly frightened all the time at the thought that it might be hungry, in which case it would be very likely to eat her up in spite of all her coaxing.

She is frightened of being eaten by a dog four hundred times her height, and she has already, twenty minutes ago, crushed a rabbit under her hand. The scale of the danger to her has not been recalibrated at all, and the reason is structural rather than careless: the changes are instantaneous, and nothing tells her what she is. A girl who had shrunk in a laboratory would know her own size to three significant figures. This girl has to measure herself against furniture every time she wakes up.

Hardly knowing what she did, she picked up a little bit of stick, and held it out to the puppy, whereupon the puppy jumped into the air off all its feet at once, with a yelp of delight, and rushed at the stick, and made believe to worry it; then Alice dodged behind a great thistle to keep herself from being run over; and the moment she appeared on the other side, the puppy made another rush at the stick and tumbled head over heels in its hurry to get hold of it; then Alice, thinking it very like having a game of play with a cart-horse, and expecting every moment to be trampled under its feet, ran round the thistle again; then the puppy began a series of short charges at the stick, running a very little way forwards each time and a long way back, and barking hoarsely all the while, till at last it sat down a good way off, panting, with its tongue hanging out of its mouth, and its great eyes half shut.

This is a scene that has been sentimentalised into a joke for a century and a half, and it is a scene about the failure of a person to know her own body. Alice plays with a puppy the way a child plays with a dog, in complete disregard of the fact that she is a nine-inch-tall object made of the same stuff the puppy is made of and would be a mouthful. She is frightened of being eaten throughout. She has no concept of the actual relation between them. The puppy is not a dog to her; it is a moving thing that responds to a stick.

This seemed to Alice a good opportunity for making her escape; so she set off at once, and ran till she was quite tired and out of breath, and till the puppy’s bark sounded quite faint in the distance.

“And yet what a dear little puppy it was!” said Alice, as she leant against a buttercup to rest herself, and fanned herself with one of the leaves: “I should have liked teaching it tricks very much, if—if I’d only been the right size to do it! Oh dear! I’d nearly forgotten that I’ve got to grow up again! Let me see—how is it to be managed? I suppose I ought to eat or drink something or other; but the great question is, what?”

She had forgotten that she had to grow up again. Not that she had grown up — that, as we have seen, she believes has already happened and cannot be helped. She had forgotten that growing is a task with a pending obligation on her, an errand she assigned to herself and then lost track of during an assault on her own house. And her solution to a problem of identity is that she ought to eat or drink something. That is the whole of her method. She is not trying to remember a word. She is not trying to find a person who did this to her. She is looking for food, because in her experience food has been the active ingredient.

The great question certainly was, what? Alice looked all round her at the flowers and the blades of grass, but she did not see anything that looked like the right thing to eat or drink under the circumstances. There was a large mushroom growing near her, about the same height as herself; and when she had looked under it, and on both sides of it, and behind it, it occurred to her that she might as well look and see what was on the top of it.

She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the mushroom, and her eyes immediately met those of a large blue caterpillar, that was sitting on the top with its arms folded, quietly smoking a long hookah, and taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else.

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself!”

“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

“I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar.

“I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,” Alice replied very politely, “for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.”

“It isn’t,” said the Caterpillar.

“Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,” said Alice; “but when you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’d feel it a little queer, won’t you?”

“Not a bit,” said the Caterpillar.

This exchange is the load-bearing one for the level and it should be quoted exactly, because the deadpan rests on the fact that both speakers are being entirely precise. She says: I am not myself. He says: I don't see. She restates: I cannot put it more clearly, because I cannot understand it. He says: it isn't confusing. And he is right. He has just come out of a chrysalis.

The whole argument of the level is in that exchange, and neither party is being obtuse. She is using “myself” to mean a person, and he is using it to mean an animal at a stage of development, and both usages are correct in their own frame. The consequence is that no answer she could possibly give would satisfy him, and the conversation therefore returns to the beginning.

“Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,” said Alice; “all I know is, it would feel very queer to me.”

“You!” said the Caterpillar contemptuously. “Who are you?”

Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation. Alice felt a little irritated at the Caterpillar’s making such very short remarks, and she drew herself up and said, very gravely, “I think, you ought to tell me who you are, first.”

“Why?” said the Caterpillar.

Here was another puzzling question; and as Alice could not think of any good reason, and as the Caterpillar seemed to be in a very unpleasant state of mind, she turned away.

“Come back!” the Caterpillar called after her. “I’ve something important to say!”

This sounded promising, certainly: Alice turned and came back again.

“Keep your temper,” said the Caterpillar.

“Is that all?” said Alice, swallowing down her anger as well as she could.

“No,” said the Caterpillar.

Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do, and perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hearing. For some minutes it puffed away without speaking, but at last it unfolded its arms, took the hookah out of its mouth again, and said, “So you think you’re changed, do you?”

“I’m afraid I am, sir,” said Alice; “I can’t remember things as I used—and I don’t keep the same size for ten minutes together!”

“Can’t remember what things?” said the Caterpillar.

“Well, I’ve tried to say “How doth the little busy bee,” but it all came different!” Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.

“Repeat, ‘You are old, Father William,’” said the Caterpillar.

And this is the experiment. She has been complaining since the rabbit's house that the words come out differently, and here is a creature that tests it. Alice folded her hands, and began:—

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said, “And your hair has become very white; And yet you incessantly stand on your head— Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

“In my youth,” Father William replied to his son, “I feared it might injure the brain; But, now that I’m perfectly sure I have none, Why, I do it again and again.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “as I mentioned before, And have grown most uncommonly fat; Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door— Pray, what is the reason of that?”

“In my youth,” said the sage, as he shook his grey locks, “I kept all my limbs very supple By the use of this ointment—one shilling the box— Allow me to sell you a couple?”

“You are old,” said the youth, “and your jaws are too weak For anything tougher than suet; Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak— Pray, how did you manage to do it?”

“In my youth,” said his father, “I took to the law, And argued each case with my wife; And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw, Has lasted the rest of my life.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “one would hardly suppose That your eye was as steady as ever; Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose— What made you so awfully clever?”

“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,” Said his father; “don’t give yourself airs! Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff? Be off, or I’ll kick you down stairs!”

“That is not said right,” said the Caterpillar.

“Not quite right, I’m afraid,” said Alice, timidly; “some of the words have got altered.”

“It is wrong from beginning to end,” said the Caterpillar decidedly, and there was silence for some minutes.

The test has a result, and the result is the finding of the level. She is not imagining it. She is not tired, not fevered, not in the middle of an ordinary bad afternoon. A poem she has known since she could speak comes out of her with the words altered throughout, and the alterations are not random — she can feel that they are wrong as she says them, and the Caterpillar confirms that the whole thing is wrong from beginning to end. She can still produce the right words. She cannot produce the right poem. She is accessing the text and failing to access the text's coherence, and nobody in the book ever finds out why, and she never does either.

What is remarkable, and what should be said plainly, is that this is the only diagnostic procedure anyone ever conducts on her. Nobody else in the entire book thinks to test her memory. The Duchess has morals. The Gryphon has opinions. The White Rabbit has a list. The Caterpillar is the only character who is, in effect, a clinician, and he runs one test and drops it.

The Caterpillar was the first to speak.

“What size do you want to be?” it asked.

“Oh, I’m not particular as to size,” Alice hastily replied; “only one doesn’t like changing so often, you know.”

“I don't know,” said the Caterpillar.

Alice said nothing: she had never been so much contradicted in her life before, and she felt that she was losing her temper.

“Are you content now?” said the Caterpillar.

“Well, I should like to be a little larger, sir, if you wouldn’t mind,” said Alice: “three inches is such a wretched height to be.”

“It is a very good height indeed!” said the Caterpillar angrily, rearing itself upright as it spoke (it was exactly three inches high).

“But I’m not used to it!” pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone. And she thought of herself, “I wish the creatures wouldn’t be so easily offended!”

“You’ll get used to it in time,” said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.

This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again. In a minute or two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and yawned once or twice, and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away in the grass, merely remarking as it went, “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.”

“One side of what? The other side of what?” thought Alice to herself.

“Of the mushroom,” said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud; and in another moment it was out of sight.

Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying to make out which were the two sides of it; and as it was perfectly round, she found this a very difficult question. However, at last she stretched her arms round it as far as they would go, and broke off a bit of the edge with each hand.

“And now which is which?” she said to herself, and nibbled a little of the right-hand bit to try the effect: the next moment she felt a violent blow underneath her chin: it had struck her foot!

She was a good deal frightened by this very sudden change, but she felt that there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking rapidly; so she set to work at once to eat some of the other bit. Her chin was pressed so closely against her foot, that there was hardly room to open her mouth; but she did it at last, and managed to swallow a morsel of the lefthand bit.

The two halves are not labelled. That is the whole operation. She has been given a mechanism and not a code, and she discovers which half does what by testing one and then, in real time, urgently eating the other. She gets it right by panic. She has, in the course of a minute, learned something about the interior of her own body that no one had thought to teach her, and she learned it because the first experiment hurt.

And then there is a passage across the middle of the book that has been read for a century as the funniest thing in it, and it is in fact the most serious, and it is the moment where the body becomes genuinely unfamiliar to her.

“Come, my head’s free at last!” said Alice in a tone of delight, which changed into alarm in another moment, when she found that her shoulders were nowhere to be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was an immense length of neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a sea of green leaves that lay far below her.

“What can all that green stuff be?” said Alice. “And where have my shoulders got to? And oh, my poor hands, how is it I can’t see you?” She was moving them about as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow, except a little shaking among the distant green leaves.

She has looked down and not found her own shoulders. She has looked down and found a neck, which she experiences as an object rising out of a landscape, and the landscape is not her body — the green stuff is unfamiliar to her and she asks what it is. The trees she has been walking among for an hour are now below her and are not recognisable as trees. She is looking at the tops of trees and cannot identify them, because the frame of reference that would let her identify them, her own body, is the thing that has changed. She has no exteroceptive map. The neck is not felt as hers; it is observed, from a distance, as something extending downward.

As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had just succeeded in curving it down into a graceful zigzag, and was going to dive in among the leaves, which she found to be nothing but the tops of the trees under which she had been wandering, when a sharp hiss made her draw back in a hurry: a large pigeon had flown into her face, and was beating her violently with its wings.

“Serpent!” screamed the Pigeon.

“I’m not a serpent!” said Alice indignantly. “Let me alone!”

“Serpent, I say again!” repeated the Pigeon, but in a more subdued tone, and added with a kind of sob, “I’ve tried every way, and nothing seems to suit them!”

“I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about,” said Alice.

“I’ve tried the roots of trees, and I’ve tried banks, and I’ve tried hedges,” the Pigeon went on, without attending to her; “but those serpents! There’s no pleasing them!”

“As if it wasn’t trouble enough hatching the eggs,” said the Pigeon; “but I must be on the look-out for serpents night and day! Why, I haven’t had a wink of sleep these three weeks!”

“I’m very sorry you’ve been annoyed,” said Alice, who was beginning to see its meaning.

“And just as I’d taken the highest tree in the wood,” continued the Pigeon, raising its voice to a shriek, “and just as I was thinking I should be free of them at last, they must needs come wriggling down from the sky! Ugh, Serpent!”

“But I’m not a serpent, I tell you!” said Alice. “I’m a—I’m a—”

“Well! What are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see you’re trying to invent something!”

“I—I’m a little girl,” said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day.

“A likely story indeed!” said the Pigeon in a tone of the deepest contempt. “I’ve seen a good many little girls in my time, but never one with such a neck as that! No, no! You’re a serpent; and there’s no use denying it. I suppose you’ll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!”

This is the identity question at its most exact. She is asked, directly, what she is, and she attempts an answer, and the attempt fails in the middle of the sentence: “I'm a—I'm a—”. She cannot produce it. And then she produces one, and she produces it doubtfully, with the doubt attached to the word rather than to the situation, and the Pigeon produces the only available alternative classification, which is based entirely on the current physical form, and which is, from the point of view of any witness who has only this afternoon's evidence, entirely reasonable.

And note that the Pigeon is not being unfair. She really might be a serpent. The evidence is: a neck that is very long, that is not attached to anything she can find, and that arrives from above. Everything the Pigeon knows about her is consistent with serpent. The Pigeon is doing the only honest thing available: classifying her on the evidence.

“I have tasted eggs, certainly,” said Alice, who was a very truthful child; “but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.”

“I don’t believe it,” said the Pigeon; “but if they do, why then they’re a kind of serpent, that’s all I can say.”

This was such a new idea to Alice, that she was quite silent for a minute or two, which gave the Pigeon the opportunity of adding, “You’re looking for eggs, I know that well enough; and what does it matter to me whether you’re a little girl or a serpent?”

“It matters a good deal to me,” said Alice hastily; “but I’m not looking for eggs, as it happens; and if I was, I shouldn’t want yours: I don’t like them raw.”

She is arguing for the category, not for the facts. She does not say “I was born in a house and I have a sister and a cat called Dinah and I am reading a book on the bank.” She says: it matters to me which I am. The distinction has become important to her, and it has become important because it is now the only thing she is defending. She has lost every other fact — her size, her arithmetic, her poems, her place in the world — and she is left with the classification of herself.

“Well, be off, then!” said the Pigeon in a sulky tone, as it settled down again into its nest. Alice crouched down among the trees as well as she could, for her neck kept getting entangled among the branches, and every now and then she had to stop and untwist it. After a while she remembered that she still held the pieces of mushroom in her hands, and she set to work very carefully, nibbling first at one and then at the other, and growing sometimes taller and sometimes shorter, until she had succeeded in bringing herself down to her usual height.

She has the instrument in her hand. She has the pieces. She has been on a detour of some hundreds of words of pigeon, and she returns to the operation, and this is the pattern that will govern the rest of the book: the interruption is absorbed, the work resumes, and the interruption is not thought about afterwards. She was told what she is by a bird, and the bird's account was obviously wrong, and she has a job to do.

It was so long since she had been anything near the right size, that it felt quite strange at first; but she got used to it in a few minutes, and began talking to herself, as usual. “Come, there’s half my plan done now! How puzzling all these changes are! I’m never sure what I’m going to be, from one minute to another! However, I’ve got back to my right size: the next thing is, to get into that beautiful garden—how is that to be done, I wonder?”

As she said this, she came suddenly upon an open place, with a little house in it about four feet high. “Whoever lives there,” thought Alice, “it’ll never do to come upon them this size: why, I should frighten them out of their wits!” So she began nibbling at the righthand bit again, and did not venture to go near the house till she had brought herself down to nine inches high.

That is a decision with a moral content, and she makes it lightly. She does not want to frighten anybody. She has crushed a rabbit this morning and eaten a cake out of a shower of pebbles, and she has now worked out that her size is a problem for other people, and has adjusted herself accordingly without any instruction to do so. It is the first act of consideration she performs for another creature in the book, and it is performed nine inches high, and it is performed because she has remembered, from the rabbit's house, that small people can be hurt by large ones.

Which brings us to the Duchess. And the Duchess is where the theme stops being about Alice's body and becomes about who is in the room.

For a minute or two she stood looking at the house, and wondering what to do next, when suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the wood — (she considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a fish) — and rapped loudly at the door with his knuckles. It was opened by another footman in livery, with a round face, and large eyes like a frog; and both footmen, Alice noticed, had powdered hair that curled all over their heads. She felt very curious to know what it was all about, and crept a little way out of the wood to listen.

The Fish-Footman began by producing from under his arm a great letter, nearly as large as himself, and this he handed over to the other, saying, in a solemn tone, “For the Duchess. An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.” The Frog-Footman repeated, in the same solemn tone, only changing the order of the words a little, “From the Queen. An invitation for the Duchess to play croquet.”

Then they both bowed low, and their curls got entangled together.

Alice laughed so much at this, that she had to run back into the wood for fear of their hearing her; and when she next peeped out the Fish-Footman was gone, and the other was sitting on the ground near the door, staring stupidly up into the sky.

Alice went timidly up to the door, and knocked.

“There’s no sort of use in knocking,” said the Footman, “and that for two reasons. First, because I’m on the same side of the door as you are; secondly, because they’re making such a noise inside, no one could possibly hear you.” And certainly there was a most extraordinary noise going on within — a constant howling and sneezing, and every now and then a great crash, as if a dish or kettle had been broken to pieces.

“Please, then,” said Alice, “how am I to get in?”

“There might be some sense in your knocking,” the Footman went on without attending to her, “if we had the door between us. For instance, if you were inside, you might knock, and I could let you out, you know.” He was looking up into the sky all the time he was speaking, and this Alice thought decidedly uncivil. “But perhaps he can’t help it,” she said to herself; “his eyes are so very nearly at the top of his head. But at any rate he might answer questions.—How am I to get in?” she repeated, aloud.

“I shall sit here,” the Footman remarked, “till tomorrow—”

At this moment the door of the house opened, and a large plate came skimming out, straight at the Footman’s head: it just grazed his nose, and broke to pieces against one of the trees behind him.

“—or next day, maybe,” the Footman continued in the same tone, exactly as if nothing had happened.

“How am I to get in?” asked Alice again, in a louder tone.

“Are you to get in at all?” said the Footman. “That’s the first question, you know.”

It was, no doubt: only Alice did not like to be told so. “It’s really dreadful,” she muttered to herself, “the way all the creatures argue. It’s enough to drive one crazy!”

The Footman seemed to think this a good opportunity for repeating his remark, with variations. “I shall sit here,” he said, “on and off, for days and days.”

“But what am I to do?” said Alice.

“Anything you like,” said the Footman, and began whistling.

“Oh, there’s no use in talking to him,” said Alice desperately: “he’s perfectly idiotic!” And she opened the door and went in.

The Footman's question — are you to get in at all — is the question of the level, asked by a doorman and answered by nobody. The whole of the household around the Duchess works by that question. The Duchess's answer to it is to shout. The footman's answer is to wait. And Alice's answer is to open the door, which is to say: to act on the assumption that she is entitled to be where she is, in a place she has not been invited to, at a scale the household has not been built for. She does not ask permission again. She has asked three times and been given a non-answer, and she treats the non-answer as consent, and she is right, in the sense that nothing happens.

The door led right into a large kitchen, which was full of smoke from one end to the other: the Duchess was sitting on a three-legged stool in the middle, nursing a baby; the cook was leaning over the fire, stirring a large cauldron which seemed to be full of soup.

“There’s certainly too much pepper in that soup!” Alice said to herself, as well as she could for sneezing.

There was certainly too much of it in the air. Even the Duchess sneezed occasionally; and as for the baby, it was sneezing and howling alternately without a moment’s pause. The only things in the kitchen that did not sneeze were the cook, and a large cat which was sitting on the hearth and grinning from ear to ear.

This kitchen is the book in miniature. Three of the four occupants are in a state of altered consciousness produced by a substance: the Duchess is made hot-tempered by pepper, the baby is sneezing, the cook is unaffected, and the cat is grinning. The substance is in the soup and also in the air, and the people in the room have not noticed the difference between themselves and the cook. Alice notices it in the first sentence she speaks and then never mentions it again, because she is at the mercy of the sneeze. Later she will remember it, alone, and construct a theory — that it is always pepper that makes people hot-tempered, and vinegar that makes them sour, and camomile that makes them bitter — and that theory will turn out to be the closest thing to a moral the book supplies.

“Please would you tell me,” said Alice, a little timidly, for she was not quite sure whether it was good manners for her to speak first, “why your cat grins like that?”

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

She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice quite jumped; but she saw in another moment that it was addressed to the baby, and not to her, so she took courage, and went on again:—

“I didn’t know that Cheshire cats always grinned; in fact, I didn’t know that cats could grin.”

“They all can,” said the Duchess; “and most of ’em do.”

“I don’t know of any that do,” Alice said very politely, feeling quite pleased to have got into a conversation.

“You don’t know much,” said the Duchess; “and that’s a fact.”

Alice did not at all like the tone of this remark, and thought it would be as well to introduce some other subject of conversation. While she was trying to fix on one, the cook took the cauldron of soup off the fire, and at once set to work throwing everything within her reach at the Duchess and the baby — the fire-irons came first; then followed a shower of saucepans, plates, and dishes. The Duchess took no notice of them even when they hit her; and the baby was howling so much already, that it was quite impossible to say whether the blows hurt it or not.

“Oh, please mind what you’re doing!” cried Alice, jumping up and down in an agony of terror. “Oh, there goes his precious nose!” as an unusually large saucepan flew close by it, and very nearly carried it off.

“If everybody minded their own business,” the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”

“Which would not be an advantage,” said Alice, who felt very glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge. “Just think of what work it would make with the day and night! You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis—”

“Talking of axes,” said the Duchess, “chop off her head!”

Alice glanced rather anxiously at the cook, to see if she meant to take the hint; but the cook was busily stirring the soup, and seemed not to be listening, so she went on again: “Twenty-four hours, I think; or is it twelve? I—”

“Oh, don’t bother me,” said the Duchess; “I never could abide figures!” And with that she began nursing her child again, singing a sort of lullaby to it as she did so, and giving it a violent shake 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.”

CHORUS. (In which the cook and the baby joined):

“Wow! wow! wow!”

While the Duchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept tossing the baby violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so, that Alice could hardly hear the words:—

“I speak severely to my boy, I beat him when he sneezes; For he can thoroughly enjoy The pepper when he pleases!”

CHORUS.

“Wow! wow! wow!”

And here the argument of the level is stated in its plainest form, by a woman who has beaten her child and is being asked, in effect, to justify it, and who answers with a song in which the child is described as doing it on purpose. There is no appeal to nature or to a higher authority. The only argument offered is that the child enjoys it, and the only counter-argument is that it is a baby and cannot be asked whether it enjoys anything. The Duchess's position is not that the baby has rights. It is that the baby wants it. The whole of the Queen of Hearts' court is built on this position, and so, later, is the entire trial.

“Here! you may nurse it a bit, if you like!” the Duchess said to Alice, flinging the baby at her as she spoke. “I must go and get ready to play croquet with the Queen,” and she hurried out of the room. The cook threw a frying-pan after her as she went out, but it just missed her.

Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, “just like a star-fish,” thought Alice. The poor little thing was snoring like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it.

She has been handed a baby by a woman who is leaving. There has been no handover, no consent, no explanation. The baby is nine inches long and Alice is nine inches high, and Alice catches it, and there is a moment in which the physical difficulty of holding a small heavy thing is the entire of the transaction.

As soon as she had made out the proper way of nursing it, (which was to twist it up into a sort of knot, and then keep tight hold of its right ear and left foot, so as to prevent its undoing itself,) she carried it out into the open air. “If I don’t take this child away with me,” thought Alice, “they’re sure to kill it in a day or two: wouldn’t it be murder to leave it behind?” She said the last words out loud, and the little thing grunted in reply (it had left off sneezing by this time).

“Don’t grunt,” said Alice; “that’s not at all a proper way of expressing yourself.”

The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its face to see what was the matter with it. There could be no doubt that it had a very turn-up nose, much more like a snout than a real nose; also its eyes were getting extremely small for a baby: altogether Alice did not like the look of the thing at all. “But perhaps it was only sobbing,” she thought, and looked into its eyes again, to see if there were any tears.

No, there were no tears. “If you’re going to turn into a pig, my dear,” said Alice, seriously, “I’ll have nothing more to do with you. Mind now!” The poor little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossible to say which), and they went on for some while in silence.

And this is the second transformation witnessed at close quarters, and it is the one nobody has prepared her for. The caterpillar's changes were announced by instructions on objects. This one is happening to a baby in her arms, and it is happening without any label at all. She can see it happening: the nose turning up, the eyes closing down, the body shortening and thickening under her hands. She has her hand on it. She can feel the change occurring.

And her response is to set a condition on her own continued relationship with it: if you are going to turn into a pig, I will have nothing more to do with you. This is the first time in the book that Alice states a position on the subject of what she will and will not associate with. It is conditioned on the animal. If the baby does not turn into a pig, she will carry it. There is no question raised about the change itself, because at nine inches high, holding a pig-baby, the change is not the remarkable thing. The remarkable thing would be a baby that stays a baby.

Alice was just beginning to think to herself, “Now, what am I to do with this creature when I get it home?” when it grunted again, so violently, that she looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be no mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would be quite absurd for her to carry it further.

So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot away quietly into the wood. “If it had grown up,” she said to herself, “it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.” And she began thinking over other children she knew, who might do very well as pigs, and was just saying to herself, “if one only knew the right way to change them—” when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.

There is the level's whole method in one sentence. If one only knew the right way to change them. She has watched a child become an animal. She has watched herself become nine feet. She has been told by a caterpillar that she will one day become a chrysalis and then a butterfly. She has assembled the entire body of available evidence, and what she wants is not to know who she is. She wants to know the procedure. Somebody, she is certain, knows how this is done, and if she can find them she can get back to being the size that lets her go through doors.

The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.

“Cheshire Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. “Come, it’s pleased so far,” thought Alice, and she went on. “Would you tell me, please, 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.

“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

This exchange should be set down without commentary, because it is the epistemology of the whole book in three lines. She asks for a direction. The Cat establishes that a direction cannot be specified without a destination. She supplies a destination — somewhere. The Cat then removes the destination and asserts that any direction will do. And she accepts it. She does not object. She does not point out that "somewhere" was the whole of her condition and that it has been quietly deleted. She goes on.

Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. “What sort of people live about here?”

“In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”

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

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

She begins the conversation by refusing to go among mad people. The Cat then tells her that everybody where she is, including herself, is mad, and that this is established not by behaviour but by location: you must be mad, or you wouldn't have come here. Madness is defined as the property of having arrived. It is a diagnosis from the fact of presence, and it is unappealable, and Alice does not appeal it.

Alice didn’t think that proved it at all; however, she went on “And how do you know that you’re mad?”

“To begin with,” said the Cat, “a dog’s not mad. You grant that?”

“I suppose so,” said Alice.

“Well, then,” the Cat went on, “you see, a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.”

This is the definition, and it is a real one and it is used throughout the book. Madness is established by the inversion of a sign. The tail means anger in a cat and pleasure in a dog. The same movement, given the same reference, produces opposite readings depending on who is doing the reading — and the Cat's proof is not that it is different from a dog but that it has taken the dog as its reference class. There is no fact about the Cat's tail in the world. There is only the position the Cat occupies in a scheme of comparison. And it has chosen the scheme, and by occupying it declares itself mad, and then says so.

It is also, and this must be said because it is the joke as well as the metaphysics, that the Cat's statement is a joke about a manual. Children are told to wag their tails to say they are pleased. The Cat has read the same manual. The Cat has implemented the instruction correctly and reached the wrong conclusion, and the whole comedy is in the fact that neither party can see the mistake, because the manual does not contain an entry for cats.

“I call it purring, not growling,” said Alice.

“Call it what you like,” said the Cat. “Do you play croquet with the Queen to-day?”

“I should like it very much,” said Alice, “but I haven’t been invited yet.”

“You’ll see me there,” said the Cat, and vanished.

Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so used to queer things happening. While she was looking at the place where it had been, it suddenly appeared again.

“By-the-bye, what became of the baby?” said the Cat. “I’d nearly forgotten to ask.”

“It turned into a pig,” Alice quietly said, just as if it had come back in a natural way.

“I thought it would,” said the Cat, and vanished again.

Alice waited a little, half expecting to see it again, but it did not appear, and after a minute or two she walked on in the direction in which the March Hare was said to live. “I’ve seen hatters before,” she said to herself; “the March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May it won’t be raving mad—at least not so mad as it was in March.” As she said this, she looked up, and there was the Cat again, sitting on a branch of a tree.

“Did you say pig, or fig?” said the Cat.

“I said pig,” replied Alice; “and I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.”

“All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained 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 in my life!”

There is no cat. There is a grin. The grin has, in the ordinary way, no continuity with the animal that produced it, and Alice is not being poetic when she observes this — she is being exact, and she has noticed something that the rest of the book will spend two hundred pages confirming. The grin is the only part of the Cheshire Cat that stays put. Everything else — the body, the voice, the opinions — is transient. And the grin is also the only thing anyone in Wonderland describes as being like a cat.

She has gone from a creature that has a fixed position to a creature with no position at all, and she has not paused to consider this, and the transition is made by a joke about figs. She was carrying a baby, the baby was a pig, the pig went into the wood, and the cat — the only fixed point she has had since the Caterpillar — has dissolved into a smile.

She had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house of the March Hare: she thought it must be the right house, because the chimneys were shaped like ears and the roof was thatched with fur. It was so large a house, that she did not like to go nearer till she had nibbled some more of the lefthand bit of mushroom, and raised herself to about two feet high: even then she walked up towards it rather timidly, saying to herself “Suppose it should be raving mad after all! I almost wish I’d gone to see the Hatter instead!”

There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. “Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,” thought Alice; “only, as it’s asleep, I suppose it doesn’t mind.”

The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it: “No room! No room!” they cried out when they saw Alice coming. “There’s plenty of room!” said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.

“Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.

Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea.

“I don’t see any wine,” she remarked.

“There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.

“Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it,” said Alice angrily.

“It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,” said the March Hare.

“I didn’t know it was your table,” said Alice; “it’s laid for a great many more than three.”

The tea party is the moment at which Alice stops being able to read the room, and the reason is worth stating precisely: she has been in Wonderland for some hours and has not yet had a conversation that consisted of two people exchanging information. Every exchange she has had so far has been a redirection. The Mouse did not tell his history. The Caterpillar did not say who he was. The Cat did not tell her the way. And now the Hare offers her wine that is not there, and his objection to her is not that she has taken something but that she has sat down in a place that was laid for a number of people she has never met and will not meet.

The party's position, stated plainly: a table laid for nobody in particular, occupied at one corner by three creatures who have not cleaned it since the last occasion, occupied at the other end by a child who has been invited by nobody. Both parties are behaving correctly according to their own arrangement and neither can be corrected, because there is no account of the arrangement on the table.

“Your hair wants cutting,” said the Hatter. He had been looking at Alice for some time with great curiosity, and this was his first speech.

“You should learn not to make personal remarks,” Alice said with some severity; “it’s very rude.”

The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”

“Come, we shall have some fun now!” thought Alice. “I’m glad they’ve begun asking riddles.—I believe I can guess that,” she added aloud.

“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.

“Exactly so,” said Alice.

“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.

“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”

“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”

“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”

“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in its sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”

“It is the same thing with you,” said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.

Three animals, one asleep, produce the same logical objection three times in three different forms, and each of them is correct. The argument — that saying you mean what you say is a different proposition from the content of what you say — is sound, and Alice has no answer to it, and the table waits. This is the level's method in a single scene: a rule is stated three times by three people who agree with each other, and it is not argued against, and no one acts on it.

The Hatter was the first to break the silence. “What day of the month is it?” he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.

Alice considered a little, and then said “The fourth.”

“Two days wrong!” sighed the Hatter. “I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works!” he added looking angrily at the March Hare.

“It was the best butter,” the March Hare meekly replied.

“Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,” the Hatter grumbled: “you shouldn’t have put it in with the bread-knife.”

The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, “It was the best butter, you know.”

Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity. “What a funny watch!” she remarked. “It tells the day of the month, and doesn’t tell what o’clock it is!”

“Why should it?” muttered the Hatter. “Does your watch tell you what year it is?”

“Of course not,” Alice replied very readily; “but that’s because it stays the same year for such a long time together.”

“Which is just the case with mine,” said the Hatter.

Alice felt dreadfully puzzled, The Hatter’s remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. “I don’t quite understand you,” she said, as politely as she could.

The Hatter's watch is the only timepiece in the book that measures time without measuring a duration. It has a day and no hour, a date and no year. It is a clock that cannot tell you how long anything has taken, in a place where the question of how long anything takes is the one question she cannot answer — how long since she got up this morning, how long ago she was a different person, how long the day has been. And his remark is that his watch does not report the year for the same reason hers does not: the year stays the same for such a long time together. Time here does not pass. It accrues, in one dimension, and only in one.

“The Dormouse is asleep again,” said the Hatter, and he poured a little hot tea upon its nose.

The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without opening its eyes, “Of course, of course; just what I was going to remark myself.”

“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.

“No, I give it up,” Alice replied: “what’s the answer?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.

“Nor I,” said the March Hare.

Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said, “than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.”

“If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Alice.

“Of course you don’t!” the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. “I dare say you never even spoke to Time!”

“Perhaps not,” Alice cautiously replied: “but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.”

“Ah! that accounts for it,” said the Hatter. “He won’t stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o’clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you’d only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!”

(“I only wish it was,” the March Hare said to itself in a whisper.)

“That would be grand, certainly,” said Alice thoughtfully: “but then—I shouldn’t be hungry for it, you know.”

“Not at first, perhaps,” said the Hatter: “but you could keep it to half-past one as long as you liked.”

“Is that the way you manage?” Alice asked.

The Hatter shook his head mournfully. “Not I!” he replied. “We quarrelled last March—just before he went mad, you know—” (pointing with his tea spoon at the March Hare,) “—it was at the great concert given by the Queen of Hearts, and I had to sing

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

You know the song, perhaps?”

“I’ve heard something like it,” said Alice.

“It goes on, you know,” the Hatter continued, “in this way:—

‘Up above the world you fly, Like a tea-tray in the sky. Twinkle, twinkle—’”

Here the Dormouse shook itself, and began singing in its sleep “Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, twinkle—” and went on so long that they had to pinch it to make it stop.

“Well, I’d hardly finished the first verse,” said the Hatter, “when the Queen jumped up and bawled out, ‘He’s murdering the time! Off with his head!’”

“How dreadfully savage!” exclaimed Alice.

“And ever since that,” the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, “he won’t do a thing I ask! It’s always six o’clock now.”

Here is the deepest thing the book says about consciousness, and it is said by a hat-maker in the middle of a joke. Time is a person. You may keep on good terms with him or quarrel with him, and he will do whatever you ask, and if you quarrel with him he stops. He is not stopped by being broken; he is stopped by being offended. And he has stopped, and the symptom is that everything is now permanently six o'clock, which means that the tea has been laid out for a century and will be laid out for another, and the washing-up can never happen.

This is the exact situation of a mind that has become fixed — not damaged, not confused, but stuck, running the same loop, unable to advance, unable to recover a prior state. The Hatter does not have the ordinary human complaint that time passes too quickly or too slowly. He has a complaint that time has stopped responding to instructions, and he locates the cause in a relationship that went wrong in March, and the consequence is that no interval will now elapse for him. He is quite cheerful about it. He is the most cheerful person Alice meets.

A bright idea came into Alice’s head. “Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?” she asked.

“Yes, that’s it,” said the Hatter with a sigh: “it’s always tea-time, and we’ve no time to wash the things between whiles.”

“Then you keep moving round, I suppose?” said Alice.

“Exactly so,” said the Hatter: “as the things get used up.”

“But what happens when you come to the beginning again?” Alice ventured to ask.

“Suppose we change the subject,” the March Hare interrupted, yawning. “I’m getting tired of this. I vote the young lady tells us a story.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know one,” said Alice, rather alarmed at the proposal.

“Then the Dormouse shall!” they both cried. “Wake up, Dormouse!” And they pinched it on both sides at once.

The Dormouse slowly opened his eyes. “I wasn’t asleep,” he said in a hoarse, feeble voice: “I heard every word you fellows were saying.”

“Tell us a story!” said the March Hare.

“Yes, please do!” pleaded Alice.

“And be quick about it,” added the Hatter, “or you’ll be asleep again before it’s done.”

And here the book does something that has no business being in a children's book and has no explanation anywhere in it: the Dormouse's story is about three little sisters who live at the bottom of a well, on treacle, in a treacle-well, and who are learning to draw everything that begins with an M. And the answer to every question Alice asks is a non-sequitur delivered with total seriousness by a sleepy animal, and the more seriously it is delivered the more clearly the reader understands that the content is empty and the form is exact.

“Once upon a time there were three little sisters,” the Dormouse began in a great hurry; “and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well—”

“What did they live on?” said Alice, who always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking.

“They lived on treacle,” said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two.

“They couldn’t have done that, you know,” Alice gently remarked; “they’d have been ill.”

“So they were,” said the Dormouse; “very ill.”

Alice tried to fancy to herself what such an extraordinary way of living would be like, but it puzzled her too much, so she went on: “But why did they live at the bottom of a well?”

“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.”

“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”

“Nobody asked your opinion,” said Alice.

“Who’s making personal remarks now?” the Hatter asked triumphantly.

Alice did not quite know what to say to this: so she helped herself to some tea and bread-and-butter, and then turned to the Dormouse, and repeated her question. “Why did they live at the bottom of a well?”

The Dormouse again took a minute or two to think about it, and then said, “It was a treacle-well.”

“There’s no such thing!” Alice was beginning very angrily, but the Hatter and the March Hare went “Sh! sh!” and the Dormouse sulkily remarked, “If you can’t be civil, you’d better finish the story for yourself.”

“No, please go on!” Alice said very humbly; “I won’t interrupt again. I dare say there may be one.”

“One, indeed!” said the Dormouse indignantly. However, he consented to go on. “And so these three little sisters—they were learning to draw, you know—”

“What did they draw?” said Alice, quite forgetting her promise.

“Treacle,” said the Dormouse, without considering at all this time.

“I want a clean cup,” interrupted the Hatter: “let’s all move one place on.”

He moved on as he spoke, and the Dormouse followed him: the March Hare moved into the Dormouse’s place, and Alice rather unwillingly took the place of the March Hare. The Hatter was the only one who got any advantage from the change: and Alice was a good deal worse off than before, as the March Hare had just upset the milk-jug into his plate.

Alice did not wish to offend the Dormouse again, so she began very cautiously: “But I don’t understand. Where did they draw the treacle from?”

“You can draw water out of a water-well,” said the Hatter; “so I should think you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well—eh, stupid?”

“But they were in the well,” Alice said to the Dormouse, not choosing to notice this last remark.

“Of course they were,” said the Dormouse; “—well in.”

This answer so confused poor Alice, that she let the Dormouse go on for some time without interrupting it.

“They were learning to draw,” the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; “and they drew all manner of things—everything that begins with an M—”

“Why with an M?” said Alice.

“Why not?” said the March Hare.

Alice was silent.

The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: “—that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness—you know you say things are ‘much of a muchness’—did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?”

“Really, now you ask me,” said Alice, very much confused, “I don’t think—”

“Then you shouldn’t talk,” said the Hatter.

This piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear: she got up in great disgust, and walked off; the Dormouse fell asleep instantly, and neither of the others took the least notice of her going, though she looked back once or twice, half hoping that they would call after her: the last time she saw them, they were trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot.

“At any rate I’ll never go there again!” said Alice as she picked her way through the wood. “It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!”

She has walked away from a table she was not invited to, in a mood of justified disgust, and the two creatures at the table have not registered her departure at all, and this is not rudeness. They have a loop. The Dormouse was asleep and is asleep; the Hatter said he would be asleep again before the story was done; and Alice's presence was a variable in a scene that was going to proceed identically whether or not she was in it. She was an audience. The audience has walked out and the performance has not noticed.

She said "I'll never go there again" about a place she was not going to be able to find again anyway, because the wood does not hold still. And then, before she has finished saying it, the sentence becomes true for a reason she does not know: an hour later she will be back, at a different scale, in the same place.

Just as she said this, she noticed that one of the trees had a door leading right into it. “That’s very curious!” she thought. “But everything’s curious today. I think I may as well go in at once.” And in she went.

And this is the crack, and it should not be described too neatly, because the book does not describe it neatly and the not-neatness is the point. She is in a wood. A tree has a door in it. She goes through the door and she is in the long hall, close to the little glass table. Not a different hall. The same hall — the hall with the little curtain and the fifteen-inch door and the garden beyond — from which she departed two transformations ago, having been unable to enter the garden and having wept four inches deep.

The wood was outside. The hall was outside. She did not cross between them; there was no door in the wood, and no walk. The door in the tree is the same door from the other side, and the tree grows around it, and the hall is still the hall. Nothing has been explained. She notices this herself and does not pursue it: “Now, I’ll manage better this time,” she said to herself, and began by taking the little golden key, and unlocking the door that led into the garden.

And that sentence is the whole of the resolution of the identity problem in this book, delivered as a throwaway. She has been asking, since the fan, who she is. She has been drinking, eating, growing, shrinking, and being reshaped by objects marked with instructions. She has now come back through a door in a tree to the hall she left, and the key is where it was, and the table is where it was, and her conclusion is: now I'll manage better this time. She does not say “I am myself again.” She does not say “I have found my way back.” She says she will manage better, which is a claim about the future and not about the past, and it is the same claim she made in the wood about her plan — half of it done, garden next, how is that to be done, I wonder.

The crack in the world of the psyche level is not a portal. It is a place where the ordinary ground stops being continuous, and where a person falls through not because something opened but because the surface was never where it was supposed to be. Alice does not go through a wall. She walks into a tree and comes out in a room she has not left.

And she still has the pieces of mushroom in her pocket. She has carried a piece of the Caterpillar's mushroom through the wood, through the pigeon, through the tea party, and back into the hall, and it has not perished, and nobody has taken it. It is the one object she has been given that requires no instruction and no label, that works by contact, and that can be used to produce any size. She kept it. She used it again. That is the whole of her survival strategy.

So she went to work nibbling at the mushroom (she had kept a piece of it in her pocket) till she was about a foot high: then she walked down the little passage: and then — she found herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flower-beds and the cool fountains.

A large rose-tree stood near the entrance of the garden: the roses growing on it were white, but there were three gardeners at it, busily painting them red. Alice thought this a very curious thing, and she went nearer to watch them, and just as she came up to them she heard one of them say, “Look out now, Five! Don’t go splashing paint over me like that!”

“I couldn’t help it,” said Five, in a sulky tone; “Seven jogged my elbow.”

On which Seven looked up and said, “That’s right, Five! Always lay the blame on others!”

“You’d better not talk!” said Five. “I heard the Queen say only yesterday you deserved to be beheaded!”

“What for?” said the one who had spoken first.

“That’s none of your business, Two!” said Seven.

“Yes, it is his business!” said Five, “and I’ll tell him—it was for bringing the cook tulip-roots instead of onions.”

Seven flung down his brush, and had just begun “Well, of all the unjust things—” when his eye chanced to fall upon Alice, as she stood watching them, and he checked himself suddenly: the others looked round also, and all of them bowed low.

“Would you tell me,” said Alice, a little timidly, “why you are painting those roses?”

Five and Seven said nothing, but looked at Two. Two began in a low voice, “Why the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a red rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake; and if the Queen was to find it out, we should all have our heads cut off, you know. So you see, Miss, we’re doing our best, afore she comes, to—” At this moment Five, who had been anxiously looking across the garden, called out “The Queen! The Queen!” and the three gardeners instantly threw themselves flat upon their faces. There was a sound of many footsteps, and Alice looked round, eager to see the Queen.

This is the first place in the book where the operations of consciousness are performed by others in a way she can watch. Three men are repainting a white rose-tree red. They did not make the tree. They were given it in the wrong state, or they put in the wrong one, and their entire subsequent activity — the paint, the fear, the concealment — is a repair operation aimed at the perception of an authority who is not present and has not yet looked. They are not lying about the roses. They are changing the roses so that the observation will produce the approved conclusion. And they are not to be blamed, because the alternative is the loss of their heads.

Five blamed Seven for splashing paint. Seven blamed Two. Five said Seven deserved to be beheaded for bringing tulip-roots. This is a closed system of mutual accusation with no external arbiter and no facts, and it is the human situation exactly, and the three of them handle it competently and without any apparent distress, and Alice, standing a foot high, watches it as though it were a curiosity.

First came ten soldiers carrying clubs; these were all shaped like the three gardeners, oblong and flat, with their hands and feet at the corners: next the ten courtiers; these were ornamented all over with diamonds, and walked two and two, as the soldiers did. After these came the royal children; there were ten of them, and the little dears came jumping merrily along hand in hand, in couples: they were all ornamented with hearts. Next came the guests, mostly Kings and Queens, and among them Alice recognised the White Rabbit: it was talking in a hurried nervous manner, smiling at everything that was said, and went by without noticing her. Then followed the Knave of Hearts, carrying the King’s crown on a crimson velvet cushion; and, last of all this grand procession, came THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS.

Alice was rather doubtful whether she ought not to lie down on her face like the three gardeners, but she could not remember ever having heard of such a rule at processions; “and besides, what would be the use of a procession,” thought she, “if people had all to lie down upon their faces, so that they couldn’t see it?” So she stood still where she was, and waited.

She has now been in the place long enough to know there are rules, and to know that not knowing a rule is dangerous, and she considers lying down on her face with three men who are about to be executed for painting roses. Her reason for standing is a question about the point of a procession. It is the best reason available and it is the reason of a person who has learned to look for the mechanism under the event. And it is also, and this is the load-bearing irony, the reasoning of a witness at a trial.

When the procession came opposite to Alice, they all stopped and looked at her, and the Queen said severely “Who is this?” She said it to the Knave of Hearts, who only bowed and smiled in reply.

“Idiot!” said the Queen, tossing her head impatiently; and, turning to Alice, she went on, “What’s your name, child?”

“My name is Alice, so please your Majesty,” said Alice very politely; but she added, to herself, “Why, they’re only a pack of cards, after all. I needn’t be afraid of them!”

“And who are these?” said the Queen, pointing to the three gardeners who were lying round the rose-tree; for, you see, as they were lying on their faces, and the pattern on their backs was the same as the rest of the pack, she could not tell whether they were gardeners, or soldiers, or courtiers, or three of her own children.

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

She has worked out what they are, within about four seconds of seeing them, and she has done it on the evidence of the pattern on their backs. The Queen cannot classify them because they are lying down. Alice can classify them because she has not accepted the posture as informative. She applies her own perceptual criteria against the court's, and hers are better, and it does not save her.

The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, screamed “Off with her head! Off—”

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

The King laid his hand upon her arm, and timidly said “Consider, my dear: she is only a child!”

The Queen turned angrily away from him, and said to the Knave “Turn them over!”

The Knave did so, very carefully, with one foot.

“Get up!” said the Queen, in a shrill, loud voice, and the three gardeners instantly jumped up, and began bowing to the King, the Queen, the royal children, and everybody else.

“Leave off that!” screamed the Queen. “You make me giddy.” And then, turning to the rose-tree, she went on, “What have you been doing here?”

“May it please your Majesty,” said Two, in a very humble tone, going down on one knee as he spoke, “we were trying—”

“I see!” said the Queen, who had meanwhile been examining the roses. “Off with their heads!” and the procession moved on, three of the soldiers remaining behind to execute the unfortunate gardeners, who ran to Alice for protection.

“You shan’t be beheaded!” said Alice, and she put them into a large flower-pot that stood near. The three soldiers wandered about for a minute or two, looking for them, and then quietly marched off after the others.

“Are their heads off?” shouted the Queen.

“Their heads are gone, if it please your Majesty!” the soldiers shouted in reply.

“That’s right!” shouted the Queen. “Can you play croquet?”

The soldiers were silent, and looked at Alice, as the question was evidently meant for her.

“Yes!” shouted Alice.

She has just been told that three men are to have their heads cut off, has prevented it by putting them in a flower-pot, and has answered a question about the state of their heads on behalf of soldiers who have not looked in the pot. She has committed a small fraud, entirely spontaneously, in order to prevent three executions, and she has committed it while standing in the open in front of the only authority that could punish her for it. She does not hesitate. She does not consider it. She has spent an afternoon watching a court that takes people's heads off on suspicion, and she has drawn the obvious conclusion, which is that what one does in a court is agree with it.

“Come on, then!” roared the Queen, and Alice joined the procession, wondering very much what would happen next.

“It’s—it’s a very fine day!” said a timid voice at her side. She was walking by the White Rabbit, who was peeping anxiously into her face.

“Very,” said Alice: “—where’s the Duchess?”

“Hush! Hush!” said the Rabbit in a low, hurried tone. He looked anxiously over his shoulder as he spoke, and then raised himself upon tiptoe, put his mouth close to her ear, and whispered “She’s under sentence of execution.”

“What for?” said Alice.

“Did you say ‘What a pity!’?” the Rabbit asked.

“No, I didn’t,” said Alice: “I don’t think it’s at all a pity. I said ‘What for?’”

“She boxed the Queen’s ears—” the Rabbit began. Alice gave a little scream of laughter. “Oh, hush!” the Rabbit whispered in a frightened tone. “The Queen will hear you! You see, she came rather late, and the Queen said—”

There is the conditioning in its purest form, and it should be read exactly. The Rabbit, frightened, asks Alice whether she said a particular thing. He is not asking whether she said it. He is asking her to produce the correct reaction. And she does: she denies it and supplies the correct reaction herself, at speed, and in the correct tone — “I don’t think it’s at all a pity. I said ‘What for?’” She has been in Wonderland four hours and she has learned the reflex.

And the content of the conditioning is a joke about language at the exact level where language ceases to be a report of facts and becomes an instrument of survival. The Queen's one recorded act of violence against a member of her own court is a slap, and the Rabbit's fear is of Alice's *laugh*, not of the slap.

“Get to your places!” shouted the Queen in a voice of thunder, and people began running about in all directions, tumbling up against each other and so on; however, they got settled down in a minute or two, and the game began. Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet-ground in her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches.

The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up and walking off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed.

Everything she is required to aim with is alive and does not want to be aimed with. The instrument of the act refuses to be the instrument. The target rolls away. The goalposts stand up and walk off. And the conclusion she draws is that it is a difficult game — a conclusion about the difficulty, never about the arrangement. She plays four minutes of an impossible sport and reports the difficulty, and then the Queen sentences people to death for missing their turns, and the correct response to that is “off with his head,” and the whole thing proceeds.

The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting “Off with his head!” or “Off with her head!” about once in a minute.

Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure, she had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute, “and then,” thought she, “what would become of me? They’re dreadfully fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is, that there’s any one left alive!”

She is looking about for some way of escape, and wondering whether she could get away without being seen, when she noticed a curious appearance in the air: it puzzled her very much at first, but, after watching it a minute or two, she made it out to be a grin, and she said to herself “It’s the Cheshire Cat: now I shall have somebody to talk to.”

“How are you getting on?” said the Cat, as soon as there was mouth enough for it to speak with.

Alice waited till the eyes appeared, and then nodded. “It’s no use speaking to it,” she thought, “till its ears have come, or at least one of them.” In another minute the whole head appeared, and then Alice put down her flamingo, and began an account of the game, feeling very glad she had someone to listen to her. The Cat seemed to think that there was enough of it now in sight, and no more of it appeared.

“I don’t think they play at all fairly,” Alice began, in rather a complaining tone, “and they all quarrel so dreadfully one can’t hear oneself speak—and they don’t seem to have any rules in particular; at least, if there are, nobody attends to them—and you’ve no idea how confusing it is all the things being alive; for instance, there’s the arch I’ve got to go through next walking about at the other end of the ground—and I should have croqueted the Queen’s hedgehog just now, only it ran away when it saw mine coming!”

And there it is. She has found, in four minutes of observation, the whole diagnosis of the place, and she states it as a complaint about fairness. There are no rules in particular. If there are rules, nobody attends to them. Nothing is what it appears to be. And the instrument of the game is not an instrument and the goal is not a goal. She has identified the structure precisely. She then does nothing whatever with the identification, because it is a complaint, and complaining is what a child does in a garden, and she goes on to the two questions that matter to her, which are what the Queen is like and who she is talking to.

“How do you like the Queen?” said the Cat in a low voice.

“Not at all,” said Alice: “she’s so extremely—” Just then she noticed that the Queen was close behind her, listening: so she went on, “—likely to win, that it’s hardly worth while finishing the game.”

She began a sentence about the Queen and finished it as a compliment, because the Queen was listening. The sentence completed itself in the direction that was safe. This is not lying — she does not believe what she says when she says it, and she is not lying about what she thinks when she says it. She is choosing the sentence that will survive. It is the Rabbit's lesson applied without the Rabbit.

The Queen smiled and passed on.

“Who are you talking to?” said the King, going up to Alice, and looking at the Cat’s head with great curiosity.

“It’s a friend of mine—a Cheshire Cat,” said Alice: “allow me to introduce it.”

“I don’t like the look of it at all,” said the King: “however, it may kiss my hand if it likes.”

“I’d rather not,” the Cat remarked.

“Don’t be impertinent,” said the King, and don’t look at me like that!” He got behind Alice as he spoke.

“A cat may look at a king,” said Alice. “I’ve read that in some book, but I don’t remember where.”

The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. “Off with his head!” she said, without even looking round.

“I’ll fetch the executioner myself,” said the King eagerly, and he hurried off.

And here is the throne. Alice said that she had read in a book that a cat may look at a king, and she could not remember where. She has been in Wonderland for some hours and she is still reaching for her own library to find a precedent. She is quoting the outside world to a king of a deck of cards, and quoting it accurately, and it does not work, and she does not know why: the Queen has never been told, and cannot be told, that a cat may look at a king. The book was not available to the Queen and her court never had one.

And what the Queen has instead, is a sentence, and she has one way of using it, and she uses it without looking round, because there is no question before her that the sentence does not answer.

Alice thought she might as well go back, and see how the game was going on, as she heard the Queen’s voice in the distance, screaming with passion. She had already heard her sentence three of the players to be executed for having missed their turns, and she did not like the look of things at all, as the game was in such confusion that she never knew whether it was her turn or not. So she went in search of her hedgehog.

The hedgehog was engaged in a fight with another hedgehog, which seemed to Alice an excellent opportunity of croqueting one of them with the other: the only difficulty was, that her flamingo was gone across to the other side of the garden, where Alice could see it trying in a helpless sort of way to fly up into a tree.

By the time she had caught the flamingo and brought it back, the fight was over, and both the hedgehogs were out of sight: “but it doesn’t matter much,” thought Alice, “as all the arches are gone from this side of the ground.” So she tucked it away under her arm, that it might not escape again, and went back for a little more conversation with her friend.

When she got back to the Cheshire Cat, she was surprised to find quite a large crowd collected round it: there was a dispute going on between the executioner, the King, and the Queen, who were all talking at once, while all the rest were quite silent, and looked very uncomfortable.

The moment Alice appeared, she was appealed to by all three to settle the question, and they repeated their arguments to her, though, as they all spoke at once, she found it very hard indeed to make out exactly what they said.

The executioner’s argument was, that you couldn’t cut off a head unless there was a body to cut it off from: that he had never had to do such a thing before, and he wasn’t going to begin at his time of life.

The King’s argument was, that anything that had a head could be beheaded, and that you weren’t to talk nonsense.

The Queen’s argument was, that if something wasn’t done about it in less than no time she’d have everybody executed, all round. (It was this last remark that had made the whole party look so grave and anxious.)

Alice could think of nothing else to say but “It belongs to the Duchess: you’d better ask her about it.”

Three adults, each with a different account of the world, all turn to a child to arbitrate. She is the only one present who is not invested in the outcome and who has not been given a role in the dispute. This is what an unentangled witness is for. And what she says is: I don't know, but someone else does — it belongs to the Duchess, you'd better ask her. She has learned from the Caterpillar that this is what the Caterpillar does with every question, and she has learned it from the Rabbit, and the two of them are the only characters in the book from whom she learns anything that turns out to be usable.

“She’s in prison,” said the Queen said to the executioner: “fetch her here.” And the executioner went off like an arrow.

The Cat’s head began fading away the moment he was gone, and, by the time he had come back with the Duchess, it had entirely disappeared; so the King and the executioner ran wildly up and down looking for it, while the rest of the party went back to the game.

And so the Duchess is fetched out of prison, on a charge of having boxed the Queen's ears, and released, and brought back into the garden, and the whole proceeding is the result of a dispute about the correct procedure for beheading a cat which cannot be beheaded because there is no body. Alice did not resolve it. She redirected it, and the redirection produced the Duchess, and Alice's one act of judgement in the entire first half of the book is a piece of bookkeeping.

“You can’t think how glad I am to see you again, you dear old thing!” said the Duchess, as she tucked her arm affectionately into Alice’s, and they walked off together.

Alice was very glad to find her in such a pleasant temper, and thought to herself that perhaps it was only the pepper that had made her so savage when they met in the kitchen.

“When I'm a Duchess,” she said to herself, (not in a very hopeful tone though), “I won’t have any pepper in my kitchen at all. Soup does very well without—Maybe it’s always pepper that makes people hot-tempered,” she went on, very much pleased at having found out a new kind of rule, “and vinegar that makes them sour—and camomile that makes them bitter—and—and barley-sugar and such things that make children sweet-tempered. I only wish people knew that: then they wouldn’t be so stingy about it, you know—”

And here, in the middle of a book about a child who does not know who she is, the sole piece of practical wisdom she acquires is a theory of temperament: pepper for heat, vinegar for sourness, camomile for bitterness, barley-sugar for sweetness. She has observed a correlation once. She has generalised it without any evidence. And she is pleased with herself for finding out a new kind of rule. She is, in other words, exactly at the age at which a person begins to believe that they understands something.

The reader should hold on to that rule for six hundred words, because the Duchess is about to supply the moral of it and the moral is a load-bearing piece of nonsense.

She had quite forgotten the Duchess by this time, and was a little startled when she heard her voice close to her ear. “You’re thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can’t tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit.”

“Perhaps it hasn’t one,” Alice ventured to remark.

“Tut, tut, child!” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.” And she squeezed herself up closer to Alice’s side as she spoke.

Alice did not much like keeping so close to her: first, because the Duchess was very ugly; and secondly, because she was exactly the right height to rest her chin upon Alice’s shoulder, and it was an uncomfortably sharp chin. However, she did not like to be rude, so she bore it as well as she could.

“The game’s going on rather better now,” she said, by way of keeping up the conversation a little.

’Tis so,” said the Duchess: “and the moral of that is—‘Oh, ’tis love, ’tis love, that makes the world go round!’”

“Somebody said,” Alice whispered, “that it’s done by everybody minding their own business!”

“Ah, well! It means much the same thing,” said the Duchess, digging her sharp little chin into Alice’s shoulder as she added, “and the moral of that is—‘Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.’”

This is the technique, stated by a character who has no idea she is stating it. Every proposition in this book is answered by a different proposition which sounds related and is not, and the substitution is made in the tone of an elucidation, and the elucidation is always longer than the thing it elucidates. If somebody minds their own business, the sense of it changes, and then the sounds take care of themselves — meaning the words are no longer important. And this, said by the creature whose own mouth is being operated on by the Queen's will, is the level's clearest description of how language stops referring: the sense is attended to, and the sounds take care of themselves. The sounds are the ones that remain. What is left of a person after the sense has been dealt with by somebody else is a set of noises that keep being made.

“How fond she is of finding morals in things!” Alice thought to herself.

“I dare say you’re wondering why I don’t put my arm round your waist,” the Duchess said after a pause: “the reason is, that I’m doubtful about the temper of your flamingo. Shall I try the experiment?”

“He might bite,” Alice cautiously replied, not feeling at all anxious to have the experiment tried.

“Very true,” said the Duchess: “flamingoes and mustard both bite. And the moral of that is—‘Birds of a feather flock together.’”

“Only mustard isn’t a bird,” Alice remarked.

“Right, as usual,” said the Duchess: “what a clear way you have of putting things!”

“It’s a mineral, I think,” said Alice.

“Of course it is,” said the Duchess, who seemed ready to agree to everything that Alice said; “there’s a large mustard-mine near here. And the moral of that is—‘The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.’”

“Oh, I know!” exclaimed Alice, who had not attended to this last remark, “it’s a vegetable. It doesn’t look like one, but it is.”

“I quite agree with you,” said the Duchess; “and the moral of that is—‘Be what you would seem to be’—or if you’d like it put more simply—‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’”

“I think I should understand that better,” Alice said very politely, “if I had it written down: but I can’t quite follow it as you say it.”

“That’s nothing to what I could say if I chose,” said the Duchess in a pleased tone.

“Pray don’t trouble yourself to say it any longer than that,” said Alice.

“Oh, don’t talk about trouble!” said the Duchess. “I make you a present of everything I’ve said as yet.”

“A cheap sort of present!” thought Alice. “I’m glad they don’t give birthday presents like that!” But she did not venture to say it out loud.

The Duchess's sentence is not merely long. It is constructed so that it cannot be parsed twice in the same way, and it is offered to Alice as the simple version. Alice's response is the only sane response available, and it is also the most devastating: if I had it written down. That is a child asking for the abstraction to be made concrete, in a book where every abstraction turns out to have been concrete all along — where "DRINK ME" is on a bottle and the Duchess is gone in a moment and the Cat's grin stays.

“Thinking again?” the Duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp little chin.

“I’ve a right to think,” said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to feel a little worried.

“Just about as much right,” said the Duchess, “as pigs have to fly; and the m—”

But here, to Alice's great surprise, the Duchess’s voice died away, even in the middle of her favourite word ‘moral,’ and the arm that was linked into hers began to tremble. Alice looked up, and there stood the Queen in front of them, with her arms folded, frowning like a thunderstorm.

“A fine day, your Majesty!” the Duchess began in a low, weak voice.

“Now, I give you fair warning,” shouted the Queen, stamping on the ground as she spoke; “either you or your head must be off, and that in about half no time! Take your choice!”

The Duchess took her choice, and was gone in a moment.

The Duchess's sentence — the most elaborate, most beautiful, most confident piece of sustained reasoning in the book — is broken off in the middle of the word "moral," and the speaker vanishes. She was not interrupted by a competing argument. She was interrupted by an instruction, and she complied instantly, and she was not the author of the instruction. The Queen does not argue with her. The Queen gives her a binary with a deadline and the Duchess, who has been talking without interruption for a page and a half, is gone before the sentence closes.

That is what it is like to be under suggestion. It is not that the suggestion is wrong. It is that it is more recent, and it is shorter, and it is not in your voice.

“Let’s go on with the game,” the Queen said to Alice; and Alice was too much frightened to say a word, but slowly followed her back to the croquet-ground.

The other guests had taken advantage of the Queen’s absence, and were resting in the shade: however, the moment they saw her, they hurried back to the game, the Queen merely remarking that a moment’s delay would cost them their lives.

All the time they were playing the Queen never left off quarrelling with the other players, and shouting “Off with his head!” or “Off with her head!” Those whom she sentenced were taken into custody by the soldiers, who of course had to leave off being arches to do this, so that by the end of half an hour or so there were no arches left, and all the players, except the King, the Queen, and Alice, were in custody and under sentence of execution.

Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, “Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet?”

“No,” said Alice. “I don’t even know what a Mock Turtle is.”

“It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from,” said the Queen.

“I never saw one, or heard of one,” said Alice.

“Come on, then,” said the Queen, “and he shall tell you his history.”

As they walked off together, Alice heard the King say in a low voice, to the company generally, “You are all pardoned.” “Come, that’s a good thing!” she said to herself, for she had felt quite unhappy at the number of executions the Queen had ordered.

The pardon is given in a low voice, to the company generally, while the Queen is walking away and cannot hear it, and it is by a King who has no legal authority and has been consulted about nothing all afternoon. And Alice's relief is genuine and immediate: the executions she was troubled by have been cancelled, and she is glad, and she does not ask by whom or under what power.

This is the machine the trial will expose, running in the open for four hundred words before it starts. A decision is announced by someone who cannot enforce it, to people who cannot hear it, and it works.

They very soon came upon a Gryphon, lying fast asleep in the sun. “Up, lazy thing!” said the Queen, “and take this young lady to see the Mock Turtle, and to hear his history. I must go back and see after some executions I have ordered;” and she walked off, leaving Alice alone with the Gryphon. Alice did not quite like the look of the creature, but on the whole she thought it would be quite as safe to stay with it as to go after that savage Queen: so she waited.

The Gryphon sat up and rubbed its eyes: then it watched the Queen till she was out of sight: then it chuckled. “What fun!” said the Gryphon, half to itself, half to Alice.

“What is the fun?” said Alice.

“Why, she,” said the Gryphon. “It’s all her fancy, that: they never executes nobody, you know. Come on!”

“Everybody says ‘come on!’ here,” thought Alice, as she went slowly after it: “I never was so ordered about in all my life, never!”

The Gryphon waits until the Queen is out of sight before it says anything. That is the only condition under which anything true gets said in this book. The Queen's authority is not disputed; it is merely absent from the room, and in its absence the Gryphon states plainly that nobody has ever been executed, and Alice believes it and is comforted by it, and neither of them is lying.

They had not gone far before they saw the Mock Turtle in the distance, sitting sad and lonely on a little ledge of rock, and, as they came nearer, Alice could hear him sighing as if his heart would break. She pitied him deeply. “What is his sorrow?” she asked the Gryphon, and the Gryphon answered, very nearly in the same words as before, “It’s all his fancy, that: he hasn’t got no sorrow, you know. Come on!”

So they went up to the Mock Turtle, who looked at them with large eyes full of tears, but said nothing.

“This here young lady,” said the Gryphon, “she wants for to know your history, she do.”

“I’ll tell it her,” said the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow tone: “sit down, both of you, and don’t speak a word till I’ve finished.”

So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought to herself, “I don’t see how he can ever finish, if he doesn’t begin.” But she waited patiently.

“Once,” said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, “I was a real Turtle.”

These words were followed by a very long silence, broken only by an occasional exclamation of “Hjckrrh!” from the Gryphon, and the constant heavy sobbing of the Mock Turtle. Alice was very nearly getting up and saying, “Thank you, sir, for your interesting story,” but she could not help thinking there must be more to come, so she sat still and said nothing.

It is the same problem as the hall. She is again standing in front of a possibility of escape, and again she does not take it, because the current might continue. She waited for a story that had already begun with the answer to her own question. The Mock Turtle was a real Turtle. That is what she wanted to know. It is stated, once, in six words, and then followed by a silence so long that the Gryphon has to make a noise in it.

“When we were little,” the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, “we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle—we used to call him Tortoise—”

“Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn’t one?” Alice asked.

“We called him Tortoise because he taught us,” said the Mock Turtle angrily: “really you are very dull!”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question,” added the Gryphon; and then they both sat silent and looked at poor Alice, who felt ready to sink into the earth. At last the Gryphon said to the Mock Turtle, “Drive on, old fellow! Don’t be all day about it!” and he went on in these words:

“Yes, we went to school in the sea, though you mayn’t believe it—”

“I never said I didn’t!” interrupted Alice.

“You did,” said the Mock Turtle.

They named the thing for what it did to them. The master taught them, so they called him Tortoise, and the fact that he was not one was irrelevant and is treated as a foolish objection. And then, when Alice asks what a Mock Turtle is — which is her question, and the only question she came to ask — she is told she is dull.

This is the natural history of the place. The Mock Turtle was once a real Turtle, and is now a Mock Turtle, and he describes it in a past tense as a completed fact, and he weeps. He does not say what was done to him. Nobody asks. He gives a curriculum instead. And when pressed, he gives a school.

“Hold your tongue!” added the Gryphon, before Alice could speak again. The Mock Turtle went on.

“We had the best of educations—in fact, we went to school every day—”

“I’ve been to a day-school, too,” said Alice; “you needn’t be so proud as all that.”

“With extras?” asked the Mock Turtle a little anxiously.

“Yes,” said Alice, “we learned French and music.”

“And washing?” said the Mock Turtle.

“Certainly not!” said Alice indignantly.

“Ah! then yours wasn’t a really good school,” said the Mock Turtle in a tone of great relief. “Now at ours they had at the end of the bill, ‘French, music, and washing—extra.’”

“You couldn’t have wanted it much,” said Alice; “living at the bottom of the sea.”

“I couldn’t afford to learn it.” said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. “I only took the regular course.”

“What was that?” inquired Alice.

“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”

“I never heard of ‘Uglification,’” Alice ventured to say. “What is it?”

The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. “What! Never heard of uglifying!” it exclaimed. “You know what to beautify is, I suppose?”

“Yes,” said Alice doubtfully: “it means—to—make—anything—prettier.”

“Well, then,” the Gryphon went on, “if you don’t know what to uglify is, you are a simpleton.”

And here is the curriculum, given straight out: Reeling and Writhing; Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision; Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography; Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils; Laughing and Grief. Alice asks what Uglification is and is told that not knowing is proof of a deficiency of mind, and she accepts it, and asks no more questions about it.

And this is a school of altered states. Every subject on the list is a technique of consciousness, named as if it were a branch of arithmetic, taught in a place where they cannot be afforded. Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, Derision, Drawling, Stretching, Fainting, Laughing, Grief. And the Mock Turtle could not afford them and took the regular course, which cost less, and that is why he is what he is. Nobody in the book says the word for what this is.

Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more questions about it, so she turned to the Mock Turtle, and said “What else had you to learn?”

“Well, there was Mystery,” the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers, “—Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling—the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a week: he taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.”

“What was that like?” said Alice.

“Well, I can’t show it you myself,” the Mock Turtle said: “I’m too stiff. And the Gryphon never learnt it.”

“Hadn’t time,” said the Gryphon: “I went to the Classics master, though. He was an old crab, he was.”

“I never went to him,” the Mock Turtle said with a sigh: “he taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say.”

“So he did, so he did,” said the Gryphon, sighing in his turn; and both creatures hid their faces in their paws.

I am too stiff. He cannot demonstrate it. The thing that was taken out of him in the transformation is the capacity to show anybody what he still knows. He can still describe it. He cannot do it in front of you. And when the Gryphon names the master who taught Laughing and Grief, both of them put their faces in their paws, and neither of them says anything else about him.

“And how many hours a day did you do lessons?” said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject.

“Ten hours the first day,” said the Mock Turtle: “nine the next, and so on.”

“What a curious plan!” exclaimed Alice.

“That’s the reason they’re called lessons,” the Gryphon remarked: “because they lessen from day to day.”

This is quite a new idea to Alice, and she thought it over a little before she made her next remark. “Then the eleventh day must have been a holiday?”

“Of course it was,” said the Mock Turtle.

“And how did you manage on the twelfth?” Alice went on eagerly.

“That’s enough about lessons,” the Gryphon interrupted in a very decided tone: “tell her something about the games now.”

The lesson schedule is the schedule of a trance induction. Ten hours on the first day, nine on the second, and so on down to nothing. The word lesson is derived from lessen, and the Gryphon says so, and everybody accepts it, and nobody remarks that this is the definition of a graded induction: the repetition diminishes, the subject is not told why, the course ends at zero and the eleventh day is a holiday, and the twelfth day is the day the subject is expected to act.

And Alice asks how she managed on the twelfth day, and is interrupted, and does not get an answer, and never asks again.

The Mock Turtle sighed deeply, and drew the back of one flapper across his eyes. He looked at Alice, and tried to speak, but for a minute or two sobs choked his voice. “Same as if he had a bone in his throat,” said the Gryphon: and it set to work shaking him and punching him in the back. At last the Mock Turtle recovered his voice, and, with tears running down his cheeks, he went on again:—

“You may not have lived much under the sea—” (“I haven’t,” said Alice)—“and perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster—” (Alice began to say “I once tasted—” but checked herself hastily, and said “No, never”) “—so you can have no idea what a delightful thing a Lobster Quadrille is!”

“No, indeed,” said Alice. “What sort of a dance is it?”

“Why,” said the Gryphon, “you first form into a line along the sea-shore—”

“Two lines!” cried the Mock Turtle. “Seals, turtles, salmon, and so on; then, when you’ve cleared all the jelly-fish out of the way—”

“That generally takes some time,” interrupted the Gryphon.

“—you advance twice—”

“Each with a lobster as a partner!” cried the Gryphon.

“Of course,” the Mock Turtle said: “advance twice, set to partners—”

“—change lobsters, and retire in same order,” continued the Gryphon.

“Then, you know,” the Mock Turtle went on, “you throw the—”

“The lobsters!” shouted the Gryphon, with a bound into the air.

“—as far out to sea as you can—”

“Swim after them!” screamed the Gryphon.

“Turn a somersault in the sea!” cried the Mock Turtle, capering wildly about.

“Change lobsters again!” yelled the Gryphon at the top of its voice.

“Back to land again, and that’s all the first figure,” said the Mock Turtle, suddenly dropping his voice; and the two creatures, who had been jumping about like mad things all this time, sat down again very sadly and quietly, and looked at Alice.

Every creature in Wonderland who knows anything is a former thing, and every former thing knows it and no one asks. The Mock Turtle was a Turtle. The Gryphon does not volunteer its own history, and Alice does not ask it, because she has already noticed that everyone here has a former state and that the moment is always the same: the question is asked, the answer is given in a single clause, the subject moves to a curriculum or a dance or a crime, and the past is not available for further comment.

And they give her the dance. The Lobster Quadrille is the most extraordinary piece of content in the book: a dance in which every creature pairs with the thing it is going to be thrown away with, advances twice, changes partners, then throws the lobsters as far out to sea as it can and follows them into the water, turns a somersault in the sea, comes back, and does it again. The Mock Turtle says it and the Gryphon shouts it and they get it exactly right together, and then they both drop their voices and sit down and look at Alice.

Two creatures who were arguing ten seconds earlier about how the dance goes have executed it in perfect unison, at speed, without error, and have then become silent. That is the Lobster Quadrille. It is a procedure that both of them know completely and neither of them can talk about calmly. The Mock Turtle cannot demonstrate it — I am too stiff — and the Gryphon never learnt it. What they have instead is the ability to perform it, which they did, and the fact that performing it makes them sad.

“It must be a very pretty dance,” said Alice timidly.

“Would you like to see a little of it?” said the Mock Turtle.

“Very much indeed,” said Alice.

“Come, let’s try the first figure!” said the Mock Turtle to the Gryphon. “We can do without lobsters, you know. Which shall sing?”

“Oh, you sing,” said the Gryphon. “I’ve forgotten the words.”

So they began solemnly dancing round and round Alice, every now and then treading on her toes when they passed too close, and waving their forepaws to mark the time, while the Mock Turtle sang this, very slowly and sadly:—

“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. See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance! They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance? Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance? Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?

“You can really have no notion how delightful it will be When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!”

But the snail replied “Too far, too far!” and gave a look askance— Said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the dance. Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance. Would not, could not, would not, could not, could not join the dance.

“What matters it how far we go?” his scaly friend replied. “There is another shore, you know, upon the other side. The further off from England the nearer is to France— Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance. Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance? Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?”

There is an England in this song, and a France, and a distance between them, and a shore on the other side. There is a place where the dance came from and a place it is going, and the whole of the moral of the song is that the other shore exists and that the distance is not the point. The whiting is telling the snail to come and be thrown into the sea, and the reason it gives is that there is somewhere else on the far side, and that the further you get from England the nearer you get to France.

It is sung by a Mock Turtle who cannot swim any more, and Alice has, one chapter earlier, sat in a pool of her own tears and thought that everything is queer. The song is the cheerful version of her condition and the cheerful version is in the wrong key.

“Thank you, it’s a very interesting dance to watch,” said Alice, feeling very glad that it was over at last: “and I do so like that curious song about the whiting!”

“Oh, as to the whiting,” said the Mock Turtle, “they—you’ve seen them, of course?”

“Yes,” said Alice, “I’ve often seen them at dinn—” she checked herself hastily.

“I don’t know where Dinn may be,” said the Mock Turtle, “but if you’ve seen them so often, of course you know what they’re like.”

“I believe so,” Alice replied thoughtfully. “They have their tails in their mouths—and they’re all over crumbs.”

“You’re wrong about the crumbs,” said the Mock Turtle: “crumbs would all wash off in the sea. But they have their tails in their mouths; and the reason is—” here the Mock Turtle yawned and shut his eyes.—“Tell her about the reason and all that,” he said to the Gryphon.

“The reason is,” said the Gryphon, “that they would go with the lobsters to the dance. So they got thrown out to sea. So they had to fall a long way. So they got their tails fast in their mouths. So they couldn’t get them out again. That’s all.”

“Thank you,” said Alice, “it’s very interesting. I never knew so much about a whiting before.”

The whiting's tail is stuck in its own mouth because of a sequence of things that happened to it in that order, each of which was caused by the one before, and the last of which is permanent. They went with the lobsters to the dance, so they got thrown out to sea, so they had to fall a long way, so they got their tails fast in their mouths, so they couldn't get them out again. And the Gryphon says: that's all.

There is no agent anywhere in that chain. Not one step of it is anybody's fault and no step was avoidable once the previous step had occurred, and the result is a creature permanently unable to say one true thing about itself, and the reason is a party. And the Gryphon, having explained the entire mechanism of a ruined life in five sentences, ends with the word "all", which is exactly the word the Mock Turtle uses about everybody's executions.

“I can tell you more than that, if you like,” said the Gryphon. “Do you know why it’s called a whiting?”

“I never thought about it,” said Alice. “Why?”

“It does the boots and shoes,” the Gryphon replied very solemnly.

Alice was thoroughly puzzled. “Does the boots and shoes!” she repeated in a wondering tone.

“Why, what are your shoes done with?” said the Gryphon. “I mean, what makes them so shiny?”

Alice looked down at them, and considered a little before she gave her answer. “They’re done with blacking, I believe.”

“Boots and shoes under the sea,” the Gryphon went on in a deep voice, “are done with a whiting. Now you know.”

“And what are they made of?” Alice asked in a tone of great curiosity.

“Soles and eels, of course,” the Gryphon replied rather impatiently: “any shrimp could have told you that.”

The Gryphon's account of the whiting is a perfect closed system. The whiting polishes because its tail is fixed in its mouth; its tail is fixed because it fell; it fell because it was thrown out of the sea to join a dance; the dance is the dance; and its name means boots and shoes. Nothing in the explanation can be appealed to outside itself, and the whole account is self-consistent, and it answers every question the narrator asks, and it is composed entirely of consequences.

“If I’d been the whiting,” said Alice, whose thoughts were still running on the song, “I’d have said to the porpoise, ‘Keep back, please: we don’t want you with us!’”

“They were obliged to have him with them,” the Mock Turtle said: “no wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.”

“Wouldn’t it really?” said Alice in a tone of great surprise.

“Of course not,” said the Mock Turtle: “why, if a fish came to me, and told me he was going a journey, I should say ‘With what porpoise?’”

“Don’t you mean ‘purpose’?” said Alice.

“I mean what I say,” the Mock Turtle replied in an offended tone. And the Gryphon added “Come, let’s hear some of your adventures.”

This is a pun, and it is the only thing in the entire book that is left standing at the end, and it is not a pun. She says: you mean purpose. He says: I mean what I say.

He is a Mock Turtle. He was a real Turtle and was taught Reeling and Writhing, Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision, Mystery, Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils, and Laughing and Grief. He could not afford the extras. And he now says the word porpoise when he means the word purpose, and he will not be corrected, and the reason is that in his mouth the two words are the same word, because what he wants to say is: a thing does not move without a reason for moving. A fish does not swim to a destination. A fish swims because there is a purpose, and the purpose is the motion. And the Mock Turtle has lost the ability to distinguish a meaning from a sound, and he will tell you so, in the flat tone of a man defending a position he does not know he is defending.

He was told, in this book, that everything has a name and that the name is what the thing is for. It was his schoolteacher. He took the regular course only.

“I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said Alice a little timidly: “but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

“Explain all that,” said the Mock Turtle.

“No, no! The adventures first,” said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: “explanations take such a dreadful time.”

So Alice began telling them her adventures from the time when she first saw the White Rabbit. She was a little nervous about it just at first, the two creatures got so close to her, one on each side, and opened their eyes and mouths so very wide, but she gained courage as she went on. Her listeners were perfectly quiet till she got to the part about her repeating “You are old, Father William,” to the Caterpillar, and the words all coming different, and then the Mock Turtle drew a long breath, and said “That’s very curious.”

“It’s all about as curious as it can be,” said the Gryphon.

“It all came different!” the Mock Turtle repeated thoughtfully. “I should like to hear her try and repeat something now. Tell her to begin.” He looked at the Gryphon as if he thought it had some kind of authority over Alice.

“Stand up and repeat ’Tis the voice of the sluggard,’” said the Gryphon.

“How the creatures order one about, and make one repeat lessons!” thought Alice; “I might as well be at school at once.” However, she got up, and began to repeat it, but her head was so full of the Lobster Quadrille, that she hardly knew what she was saying, and the words came very queer indeed:—

’Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare, “You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.” As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.”

[later editions continued as follows: When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark, And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark, But, when the tide rises and sharks are around, His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.]

“That’s different from what I used to say when I was a child,” said the Gryphon.

“Well, I never heard it before,” said the Mock Turtle; “but it sounds uncommon nonsense.”

Alice said nothing; she had sat down with her face in her hands, wondering if anything would ever happen in a natural way again.

She has now been asked to repeat a third poem by two animals who have heard her say that she cannot repeat the second one. She performs the third one. It comes out as a poem about a Lobster who bakes too brown and sugars his hair and trims his belt and buttons and turns out his toes, and about the state of his voice depending on whether the tide is in. The substitutions are not random and they are not her own. They have a subject and a rhyme and a sense, and the sense is: the voice changes with the conditions. The Lobster is confident on dry sand and frightened with the tide about.

And she says nothing, and puts her face in her hands, and wonders if anything will ever happen in a natural way again. She has stopped trying to work out what is happening to her. That is the actual development of the arc, and it happens here, and it happens silently, and no one comments on it.

“I should like to have it explained,” said the Mock Turtle.

“She can’t explain it,” said the Gryphon hastily. “Go on with the next verse.”

“But about his toes?” the Mock Turtle persisted. “How could he turn them out with his nose, you know?”

“It’s the first position in dancing.” Alice said; but was dreadfully puzzled by the whole thing, and longed to change the subject.

“Go on with the next verse,” the Gryphon repeated impatiently: “it begins ‘I passed by his garden.’”

Alice did not dare to disobey, though she felt sure it would all come wrong, and she went on in a trembling voice:—

“I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye, How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie—”

[later editions continued as follows: The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat, While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat. When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon, Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon: While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl, And concluded the banquet—]

“What is the use of repeating all that stuff,” the Mock Turtle interrupted, “if you don’t explain it as you go on? It’s by far the most confusing thing I ever heard!”

“Yes, I think you’d better leave off,” said the Gryphon: and Alice was only too glad to do so.

Three requests to perform, one refusal to explain, one interruption to stop her, and one verdict of confusion. She was a child being made to read aloud in front of two examiners who do not know what they are asking for. And what the examiners are actually doing is trying to get at something and failing, and the failure is diagnosed as her fault.

“Shall we try another figure of the Lobster Quadrille?” the Gryphon went on. “Or would you like the Mock Turtle to sing you a song?”

“Oh, a song, please, if the Mock Turtle would be so kind,” Alice replied, so eagerly that the Gryphon said, in a rather offended tone, “Hm! No accounting for tastes! Sing her ‘Turtle Soup,’ will you, old fellow?”

The Mock Turtle sighed deeply, and began, in a voice sometimes choked with sobs, to sing this:—

“Beautiful Soup, so rich and green, Waiting in a hot tureen! Who for such dainties would not stoop? Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup! Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup! Beau—ootiful Soo—oop! Beau—ootiful Soo—oop! Soo—oop of the e—e—evening, Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

“Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish, Game, or any other dish? Who would not give all else for two pennyworth only of beautiful Soup? Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup? Beau—ootiful Soo—oop! Beau—ootiful Soo—oop! Soo—oop of the e—e—evening, Beautiful, beauti—FUL SOUP!”

There are two pennies' worth of soup in this song and the Mock Turtle weeps throughout it, and the song is the only thing about his own condition that either he or the Gryphon will give Alice. He sings about being made into soup. He does not say he is soup. He sings a song about it, in a voice "sometimes choked with sobs", and the choking is not a performance of grief, it is the sound the instrument makes.

And Alice asks for a song, and is given this one, and this is the last thing that happens to her before the trial. Her request for something to listen to is answered with a description of her own consumption, sung by a creature that is the thing being described, and she does not notice the joke, and neither does anyone else, and the Gryphon calls for a chorus, and they sing it again.

“Chorus again!” cried the Gryphon, and the Mock Turtle had just begun to repeat it, when a cry of “The trial’s beginning!” was heard in the distance.

“Come on!” cried the Gryphon, and, taking Alice by the hand, it hurried off, without waiting for the end of the song.

“What trial is it?” Alice panted as she ran; but the Gryphon only answered “Come on!” and ran the faster, while more and more faintly came, carried on the breeze that followed them, the melancholy words:—

“Soo—oop of the e—e—evening, Beautiful, beautiful Soup!”

The King and Queen of Hearts were seated on their throne when they arrived, with a great crowd assembled about them — all sorts of little birds and beasts, as well as the whole pack of cards: the Knave was standing before them, in chains, with a soldier on each side to guard him; and near the King was the White Rabbit, with a trumpet in one hand, and a scroll of parchment in the other. In the very middle of the court was a table, with a large dish of tarts upon it: they looked so good, that it made Alice quite hungry to look at them — “I wish they’d get the trial done,” she thought, “and hand round the refreshments!”

Alice has never been in a court of justice before, but she had read about them in books, and she was quite pleased to find that she knew the name of nearly everything there. “That’s the judge,” she said to herself, “because of his great wig.”

The judge, by the way, was the King; and as he wore his crown over the wig, he did not look at all comfortable, and it was certainly not becoming.

“And that’s the jury-box,” thought Alice, “and those twelve creatures,” (she was obliged to say “creatures,” you see, because some of them were animals, and some were birds,) “I suppose they are the jurors.” She said this last word two or three times over to herself, being rather proud of it: for she thought, and rightly too, that very few little girls of her age knew the meaning of it at all. However, “jury-men” would have done just as well.

The twelve jurors were all writing very busily on slates. “What are they doing?” Alice whispered to the Gryphon. “They can’t have anything to put down yet, before the trial’s begun.”

“They’re putting down their names,” the Gryphon whispered in reply, “for fear they should forget them before the end of the trial.”

“Stupid things!” Alice began in a loud, indignant voice, but she stopped hastily, for the White Rabbit cried out, “Silence in the court!” and the King put on his spectacles and looked anxiously round, to make out who was talking.

Alice could see, as well as if she were looking over their shoulders, that all the jurors were writing down “stupid things!” on their slates, and she could even make out that one of them didn’t know how to spell “stupid,” and that he had to ask his neighbour to tell him. “A nice muddle their slates’ll be in before the trial’s over!” thought Alice.

One of the jurors had a pencil that squeaked. This of course, Alice could not stand, and she went round the court and got behind him, and very soon found an opportunity of taking it away. She did it so quickly that the poor little juror (it was Bill, the Lizard) could not make out at all what had become of it; so, after hunting all about for it, he was obliged to write with one finger for the rest of the day; and this was of very little use, as it left no mark on the slate.

Here is the trial, and the whole of its method is established in its first four minutes. The jurors are writing down their names in case they forget them. A remark made aloud in the court is written down by all twelve jurors as evidence. One juror cannot spell a common word and asks his neighbour. Another has a pencil that squeaks, and a child removes it from his hand, and he spends the rest of the trial writing with one finger on a slate that takes no mark from it.

He is Bill. Bill is the Lizard who came down Alice's chimney, whom she kicked, who said: something comes at me like a Jack-in-the-box, and up I goes like a sky-rocket. He survived. And he is now, in this court, holding the pen of the tribunal, and the tribunal's record is being written by a one-fingered animal on a slate that will not take the mark.

If you want to know what this level is about, it is about that. A record is being kept. It is being kept badly, by people who cannot spell, using instruments that will not work, of events that have not happened, by a process that has been assembled out of components that were not designed for the purpose and were not fitted together by anybody who could see what they were for.

“Herald, read the accusation!” said the King.

On this the White Rabbit blew three blasts on the trumpet, and then unrolled the parchment scroll, and read as follows:—

“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!”

“Consider your verdict,” the King said to the jury.

“Not yet, not yet!” the Rabbit hastily interrupted. “There’s a great deal to come before that!”

“Call the first witness,” said the King; and the White Rabbit blew three blasts on the trumpet, and called out, “First witness!”

The first witness was the Hatter. He came in with a teacup in one hand and a piece of bread-and-butter in the other. “I beg pardon, your Majesty,” he began, “for bringing these in: but I hadn’t quite finished my tea when I was sent for.”

“You ought to have finished,” said the King. “When did you begin?”

The Hatter looked at the March Hare, who had followed him into the court, arm-in-arm with the Dormouse. “Fourteenth of March, I think it was,” he said.

“Fifteenth,” said the March Hare.

“Sixteenth,” added the Dormouse.

“Write that down,” the King said to the jury, and the jury eagerly wrote down all three dates on their slates, and then added them up, and reduced the answer to shillings and pence.

“Take off your hat,” the King said to the Hatter.

“It isn’t mine,” said the Hatter.

“Stolen!” the King exclaimed, turning to the jury, who instantly made a memorandum of the fact.

“I keep them to sell,” the Hatter added as an explanation; “I’ve none of my own. I’m a hatter.”

Here the Queen put on her spectacles, and began staring at the Hatter, who turned pale and fidgeted.

“Give your evidence,” said the King; “and don’t be nervous, or I’ll have you executed on the spot.”

This did not seem to encourage the witness at all: he kept shifting from one foot to the other, looking uneasily at the Queen, and in his confusion he bit a large piece out of his teacup instead of the bread-and-butter.

Just at this moment Alice felt a very curious sensation, which puzzled her a good deal until she made out what it was: she was beginning to grow larger again, and she thought at first she would get up and leave the court; but on second thoughts she decided to remain where she was as long as there was room for her.

“I wish you wouldn’t squeeze so,” said the Dormouse, who was sitting next to her. “I can hardly breathe.”

“I can’t help it,” said Alice very meekly: “I’m growing.”

“You’ve no right to grow here,” said the Dormouse.

“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Alice more boldly: “you know you’re growing too.”

“Yes, but I grow at a reasonable pace,” said the Dormouse: “not in that ridiculous fashion.” And he got up very sulkily and crossed over to the other side of the court.

The growth begins in the middle of the Hatter's testimony. Nobody in the court reacts to it, because nobody in the court can perceive it. The tribunal is now sixty feet long at the top and the defendant is invisible and the witness is eating a teacup and the jury is adding up three dates and the Queen has put on her spectacles, and the change in the size of a human being in the middle of the room is not an event, because there is no instrument in the room capable of receiving it. She will end this trial at four feet high and she will have to be told to leave under a rule about a mile.

She has, at this moment, been in Wonderland for perhaps five hours. She has been nine feet tall and she has been three inches tall and she has been an inch tall. She has been a serpent, a pigeon, a Mouse, a little girl who cannot remember her own multiplication table, a person who is Mabel, a person who is nobody in particular, and a Queen of the garden who lies about heads. The only thing that has been constant is that something is happening to her body without her consent and without explanation, and the only consistent response she has been able to produce is to be in the room.

All this time the Queen had never left off staring at the Hatter, and, just as the Dormouse crossed the court, she said to one of the officers of the court, “Bring me the list of the singers in the last concert!” on which the wretched Hatter trembled so, that he shook both his shoes off.

“Give your evidence,” the King repeated angrily, “or I’ll have you executed, whether you’re nervous or not.”

“I’m a poor man, your Majesty,” the Hatter began, in a trembling voice, “—and I hadn’t begun my tea—not above a week or so—and what with the bread-and-butter getting so thin—and the twinkling of the tea—”

“The twinkling of the what?” said the King.

“It began with the tea,” the Hatter replied.

“Of course twinkling begins with a T!” said the King sharply. “Do you take me for a dunce? Go on!”

“I’m a poor man,” the Hatter went on, “and most things twinkled after that—only the March Hare said—”

“I didn’t!” the March Hare interrupted in a great hurry.

“You did!” said the Hatter.

“I deny it!” said the March Hare.

“He denies it,” said the King: “leave out that part.”

And that is the entire epistemology of the trial, stated in three lines by an animal wearing a hat. The witness offers evidence. A second witness denies it. The judge rules that it is excluded. There is no question of the first witness's reliability, no question of whether he is lying, and no examination of whether the denial is true. The denial is enough. Nothing that was said survives into the record.

Every person in this book who is asked what they know gives an answer that is discarded on the grounds that somebody else has denied it, or that it is unimportant, or that it does not matter a bit.

“Well, at any rate, the Dormouse said—” the Hatter went on, looking anxiously round to see if he would deny it too: but the Dormouse denied nothing, being fast asleep.

“After that,” continued the Hatter, “I cut some more bread-and-butter—”

“But what did the Dormouse say?” one of the jury asked.

“That I can’t remember,” said the Hatter.

“You must remember,” remarked the King, “or I’ll have you executed.”

The miserable Hatter dropped his teacup and bread-and-butter, and went down on one knee. “I’m a poor man, your Majesty,” he began.

“You’re a very poor speaker,” said the King.

Here one of the guinea-pigs cheered, and was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court. (As that is rather a hard word, I will just explain to you how it was done. They had a large canvas bag, which tied up at the mouth with strings: into this they slipped the guinea-pig, head first, and then sat upon it.)

“I’m glad I’ve seen that done,” thought Alice. “I’ve so often read in the newspapers, at the end of trials, ‘There was some attempts at applause, which was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court,’ and I never understood what it meant till now.”

“If that’s all you know about it, you may stand down,” continued the King.

“I can’t go no lower,” said the Hatter: “I’m on the floor, as it is.”

“Then you may sit down,” the King replied.

Here the other guinea-pig cheered, and was suppressed.

“Come, that finished the guinea-pigs!” thought Alice. “Now we shall get on better.”

“I’d rather finish my tea,” said the Hatter, with an anxious look at the Queen, who was reading the list of singers.

“You may go,” said the King, and the Hatter hurriedly left the court, without even waiting to put his shoes on.

“—and just take his head off outside,” the Queen added to one of the officers: but the Hatter was out of sight before the officer could get to the door.

“Call the next witness!” said the King.

The next witness was the Duchess’s cook. She carried the pepper-box in her hand, and Alice guessed who it was, even before she got into the court, by the way the people near the door began sneezing all at once.

“Give your evidence,” said the King.

“Shan’t,” said the cook.

The King looked anxiously at the White Rabbit, who said in a low voice, “Your Majesty must cross-examine this witness.”

“Well, if I must, I must,” the King said, with a melancholy air, and, after folding his arms and frowning at the cook till his eyes were nearly out of sight, he said in a deep voice, “What are tarts made of?”

“Pepper, mostly,” said the cook.

“Treacle,” said a sleepy voice behind her.

“Collar that Dormouse,” the Queen shrieked out. “Behead that Dormouse! Turn that Dormouse out of court! Suppress him! Pinch him! Off with his whiskers!”

For some minutes the whole court was in confusion, getting the Dormouse turned out, and, by the time they had settled down again, the cook had disappeared.

The Rabbit says: your Majesty must cross-examine this witness. And the fact that the King does not cross-examine anybody is not recorded anywhere as a defect. It is corrected, quietly, by a servant, and the trial continues. The Knave of Hearts is on trial for stealing tarts, and the two witnesses have been the Hatter, whose evidence concerned a concert in March and the twinkling of tea, and the cook, who refuses to testify and says that tarts are made mostly of pepper. Neither of them has been asked about the tarts. The King has asked about tarts once, in the tone of a man working out a word in a crossword.

“Never mind!” said the King, with an air of great relief. “Call the next witness.” And he added in an undertone to the Queen, “Really, my dear, you must cross-examine the next witness. It quite makes my forehead ache!”

Alice watched the White Rabbit as he fumbled over the list, feeling very curious to see what the next witness would be like, “—for they haven’t got much evidence yet,” she said to herself. Imagine her surprise, when the White Rabbit read out, at the top of his shrill little voice, the name “Alice!”

“Here!” cried Alice, quite forgetting in the flurry of the moment how large she had grown in the last few minutes, and she jumped up in such a hurry that she tipped over the jury-box with the edge of her skirt, upsetting all the jurymen on to the heads of the crowd below, and there they lay sprawling about, reminding her very much of a globe of goldfish she had accidentally upset the week before.

“Oh, I beg your pardon!” she exclaimed in a tone of great dismay, and began picking them up again as quickly as she could, for the accident of the goldfish kept running in her head, and she had a vague sort of idea that they must be collected at once and put back into the jury-box, or they would die.

“The trial cannot proceed,” said the King in a very grave voice, “until all the jurymen are back in their proper places—all,” he repeated with great emphasis, looking hard at Alice as he said so.

Alice looked at the jury-box, and saw that, in her haste, she had put the Lizard in head downwards, and the poor little thing was waving its tail about in a melancholy way, being quite unable to move. She soon got it out again, and put it right; “not that it signifies much,” she said to herself; “I should think it would be quite as much use in the trial one way up as the other.”

As soon as the jury had a little recovered from the shock of being upset, and their slates and pencils had been found and handed back to them, they set to work very diligently to write out a history of the accident, all except the Lizard, who seemed too much overcome to do anything but sit with its mouth open, gazing up into the roof of the court.

“What do you know about this business?” the King said to Alice.

“Nothing,” said Alice.

“Nothing whatever?” persisted the King.

“Nothing whatever,” said Alice.

“That’s very important,” the King said, turning to the jury. They were just beginning to write this down on their slates, when the White Rabbit interrupted: “Unimportant, your Majesty means, of course,” he said in a very respectful tone, but frowning and making faces at him as he spoke.

“Unimportant, of course, I meant,” the King hastily said, and went on to himself in an undertone, “important—unimportant—unimportant—important—” as if he were trying which word sounded best.

Some of the jury wrote it down “important,” and some “unimportant.” Alice could see this, as she was near enough to look over their slates; “but it doesn’t matter a bit,” she thought to herself.

At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily writing in his note-book, cackled out “Silence!” and read out from his book, “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.

“You are,” said the King.

“Nearly two miles high,” added the Queen.

“Well, I shan’t go, at any rate,” said Alice: “besides, that’s not a regular 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.

The King turned pale, and shut his note-book hastily. “Consider your verdict,” he said to the jury, in a low, trembling voice.

The rule was invented three seconds ago, by a man who is visibly composing a book at the moment he needs an authority, and the person it is aimed at knows this instantly and says so. And he then commits the one error that undoes him entirely: if it is the oldest rule in the book, it should have been Number One. He produced it out of order. The court has a book. Alice has been in the building for five hours and she knows it has a book, because a rule was read out of it, in front of the jury, moments ago. She has made one inference, and the inference is correct, and it is the whole of her case, and it is about the numbering.

The King turned pale and shut the book, and told the jury to consider their verdict, which is what happens in every other court in the world when a lawyer has found something. He did not answer her. He did not rule against her. He referred the matter on.

“There’s more evidence to come yet, please your Majesty,” said the White Rabbit, jumping up in a great hurry; “this paper has just been picked up.”

“What’s in it?” said the Queen.

“I haven’t opened it yet,” said the White Rabbit, “but it seems to be a letter, written by the prisoner to—to somebody.”

“It must have been that,” said the King, “unless it was written to nobody, which isn’t usual, you know.”

“Who is it directed to?” said one of the jurymen.

“It isn’t directed at all,” said the White Rabbit; “in fact, there’s nothing written on the outside.” He unfolded the paper as he spoke, and added “It isn’t a letter, after all: it’s a set of verses.”

“Are they in the prisoner’s handwriting?” asked another of the jurymen.

“No, they’re not,” said the White Rabbit, “and that’s the queerest thing about it.” (The jury all looked puzzled.)

“He must have imitated somebody else’s hand,” said the King. (The jury all brightened up again.)

“Please your Majesty,” said the Knave, “I didn’t write it, and they can’t prove I did: there’s no name signed at the end.”

“If you didn’t sign it,” said the King, “that only makes the matter worse. You must have meant some mischief, or else you’d have signed your name like an honest man.”

There was a general clapping of hands at this: it was the first really clever thing the King had said that day.

“That proves his guilt,” said the Queen.

“It proves nothing of the sort!” said Alice. “Why, you don’t even know what they’re about!”

She has found the load-bearing weakness in the case in eleven words, and she found it by noticing the shape of the paper rather than the content of it. The Knave's argument is: I did not write it, and there is no signature. The King's answer is: then you meant something, because an honest man signs his name. The King's argument does not follow, and everyone in the court applauds it, and Alice says so. The jury writes it down.

But the deeper point is that the whole structure of the case has been in place since the first line of the charge, and Alice has now named it. Nobody signed this. Nobody could have. The document has no addressee on the outside and no signature at the end. It is a set of verses which came into the world unattributed, and the court has spent forty minutes generating witnesses and rules and accusations around it, and has arrived at the place where an unattributed text is being used as evidence against a man who has never been asked to explain it.

“Read them,” said the King.

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. “Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?” he asked.

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

These were the verses the White Rabbit read:—

“They told me you had been to her, And mentioned me to him: She gave me a good character, But said I could not swim.

He sent them word I had not gone (We know it to be true): If she should push the matter on, What would become of you?

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 I or she should chance to be Involved in this affair, He trusts to you to set them free, Exactly as we were.

My notion was that you had been (Before she had this fit) An obstacle that came between Him, and ourselves, and it.

Don’t let him know she liked them best, For this must ever be A secret, kept from all the rest, Between yourself and me.”

And now the whole question of the book is in front of the court. Here is a text with no author, no addressee and no signature. Here is a record of something that happened between people, in which the things that were handed round were handed back and are not where they came from. Here is a secret that must be kept between yourself and me. Here is a phrase, "exactly as we were", which asks for the return of a situation as it was. And here is "before she had this fit", in which the words fit and the fit do not fit.

And the court's response is to read it once and move to the verdict.

“That’s the most important piece of evidence we’ve heard yet,” said the King, rubbing his hands; “so now let the jury—”

“If any one of them can explain it,” said Alice, (she had grown so large in the last few minutes that she wasn’t a bit afraid of interrupting him,) “I’ll give him sixpence. I don’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it.”

The jury all wrote down on their slates, “She doesn’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it,” but none of them attempted to explain the paper.

She has put a price on the explanation — sixpence — and she is the only person in the room who has treated the document as something that could be explained rather than something that could only be used. Sixpence is the smallest sum in the book. The Mouse's tale, the thimble, the prizes at the Caucus Race, the tarts: the entire economy of Wonderland runs on quantities small enough to hold. And she offers it freely, to anyone, and no one takes it, and the jury writes her refusal down instead.

“If there’s no meaning in it,” said the King, “that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find any. And yet I don’t know,” he went on, spreading out the verses on his knee, and looking at them with one eye; “I seem to see some meaning in them, after all. “—said I could not swim—” you can’t swim, can you?” he added, turning to the Knave.

The Knave shook his head sadly. “Do I look like it?” he said. (Which he certainly did not, being made entirely of cardboard.)

“All right, so far,” said the King, and he went on muttering over the verses to himself: “‘We know it to be true—’ that’s the jury, of course—‘I gave her one, they gave him two—’ why, that must be what he did with the tarts, you know—”

“But, it goes on ‘they all returned from him to you,’” said Alice.

“Why, there they are!” said the King triumphantly, pointing to the tarts on the table. “Nothing can be clearer than that. Then again—‘before she had this fit—’ you never had fits, my dear, I think?” he said to the Queen.

“Never!” said the Queen furiously, throwing an inkstand at the Lizard as she spoke. (The unfortunate little Bill had left off writing on his slate with one finger, as he found it made no mark; but he now hastily began again, using the ink, that was trickling down his face, as long as it lasted.)

“Then the words don’t fit you,” said the King, looking round the court with a smile. There was a dead silence.

“It’s a pun!” the King added in an offended tone, and everybody laughed, “Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.

The King has solved the poem. He has found that a phrase does not apply to the Queen, and he calls this a pun, and the court laughs, and the verdict is taken. Nobody has asked whether the poem means anything. Nobody has asked who wrote it. The evidence that everybody agreed was the most important thing said that day has been disposed of in under a minute by a method that consists of noticing that one word in it does not fit one person in the room.

It is the same method as the rose-tree. Three gardeners painted white roses red so that the Queen's inspection would produce the approved conclusion. The King has read a poem about somebody else, has found that the Queen is not the somebody, and has concluded that the poem must be about the tarts. He has changed the object so that the observation will produce the approved conclusion. The white roses and the poem are the same act, and it is performed once by three frightened men who will lose their heads and once by a King who will not.

“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, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face.

Nobody moved when the Queen said off with her head. That is the only thing that happens. The Queen speaks the sentence that has worked forty times in this book, and for the first time it has been said to somebody who is not a card, and it does not work, because the sentence is a card-sentence. It is a move in a game whose pieces are the deck, and Alice is not a piece. The executioner cannot execute her because there is no procedure for it that does not require her to be one of them, and he has already told the court that he will not begin at his time of life.

She has been tried by the full apparatus, at enormous length, with two witnesses and a rule invented on the spot and a document nobody wrote, and when the sentence is pronounced nobody moves, and the reason nobody moves is that the sentence was never applicable. She walks out of it by saying the thing that is literally true: you are nothing but a pack of cards.

And she says it as an insult. She has no idea she has just identified the ontology of the court. She thinks she has been rude to the Queen.

“Wake up, Alice dear!” said her sister; “Why, what a long sleep you’ve had!”

“Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!” said Alice, and she told her sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers that you have just been reading about; and when she had finished, her sister kissed her, and said, “It was a curious dream, dear, certainly: but now run in to your tea; it’s getting late.” So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.

And here the book does the thing the level is about, and it does it in the last two pages, and it does it without any ceremony whatever.

There was a rabbit on the bank when she fell asleep and there is no rabbit on the bank when she wakes up. There was a rabbit-hole and there is a hole in the hedge that she can see from where she is lying. Everything she has experienced was produced by a change of scale and a change of state and nobody will ever know it, because the place is made entirely of the kind of thing that makes the discovery of it impossible: it is a dream, and a dream leaves no evidence, and a person who was told by the Cheshire Cat that they were mad has no way to establish the contrary.

She has not learned that she was a different person. She has learned that she was somewhere else, and the somewhere else is not available, and the four hours are a dream, and she has been told by a bird that she might be a serpent.

But her sister sat still just as she left her, leaning her head on her hand, watching the setting sun, and thinking of little Alice and all her wonderful Adventures, till she too began dreaming after a fashion, and this was her dream:—

First, she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the tiny hands were clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into hers — she could hear the very tones of her voice, and see that queer little toss of her head to keep back the wandering hair that would always get into her eyes — and still as she listened, or seemed to listen, the whole place around her became alive with the strange creatures of her little sister’s dream.

The long grass rustled at her feet as the White Rabbit hurried by — the frightened Mouse splashed his way through the neighbouring pool — she could hear the rattle of the teacups as the March Hare and his friends shared their never-ending meal, and the shrill voice of the Queen ordering off her unfortunate guests to execution — once more the pig-baby was sneezing on the Duchess’s knee, while plates and dishes crashed around it — once more the shriek of the Gryphon, the squeaking of the Lizard’s slate-pencil, and the choking of the suppressed guinea-pigs, filled the air, mixed up with the distant sobs of the miserable Mock Turtle.

So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality — the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds — the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells, and the Queen’s shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy — while the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard — while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle’s heavy sobs.

And the sister does it. The transformation is exact and every item is named and paired, and it is performed by the person who was there, not by Alice, and it is done in the passive tense, as something that happens to a place when the eyes open. The grass becomes the grass. The pool becomes the pool. The teacups become sheep-bells. The Queen's voice becomes a shepherd boy. The Mock Turtle's sobs become cattle.

She has half believed herself in Wonderland. Half. And she knows, before she opens her eyes, exactly what will be there instead, and she names it in advance, correctly, item by item, and the naming is accurate.

So the whole of the truth of the book is spoken aloud, in the past tense, by the sister, on the bank, at sunset, and it is that every single thing that happened to Alice is real, and every single thing is also going to turn into the ordinary thing it was made out of, and that this has already happened and is not going to be prevented by her knowing it.

The rabbit was the grass rustling. The pool was the pool rippling. The tea-party was the sheep-bells. The execution was a shepherd boy. And Alice, who has spent five hours being told by a caterpillar, a pigeon, a Cat, a Duchess and a King what she is, is a little girl on a bank who has been asleep.

Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.

And this is the last thing in the book, and it is the only sentence that anyone in it is permitted to finish, and it is not said by Alice.

A woman grows up, and keeps the simple and loving heart of her childhood, and tells the story to her own children, and feels their sorrows, and finds a pleasure in their joys. And the whole of the four hundred pages is inside that sentence, functioning as the tale that is told, and the telling is the ordinary human act of passing something on that cannot be passed on, because the teller knows it came from a dream and the hearers will take it as a story and neither of those is the right description.

So it is told. Not analysed, not interpreted, not explained. Told, out loud, to small children, by a woman on a bank who has just watched her little sister wake up, and who half believes in it, and who knows exactly what it is made of.

And the last thing that happens in this book is that somebody tells it to somebody, and the somebody who is told is not old enough to ask where it came from, and the somebody who tells it is not going to explain, and between the two of them the whole of Wonderland is transmitted intact and unexamined, and the level does not close.