Through the Looking-Glass: Chapters 1–4

So, to punish it, she held it up to the Looking-glass, that it might see how sulky it was — ‘and if you’re not good directly,’ she added, ‘I’ll put you through into Looking-glass House. How would you like that?’

‘You will, though,’ the Queen said, ‘if you don’t make a memorandum of it.’

He chortled in his joy.

She was getting a little giddy with so much floating in the air, and was rather glad to find herself walking again in the natural way.

So, resolutely turning her back upon the house, she set out once more down the path, determined to keep straight on till she got to the hill.

‘I — I didn’t know I had to make one — just then,’ Alice faltered out.

‘Principal rivers—there are none. Principal mountains—I’m on the only one, but I don’t think it’s got any name. Principal towns—why, what are those creatures, making honey down there? They can’t be bees—nobody ever saw bees a mile off, you know—’ and for some time she stood silent, watching one of them that was bustling about among the flowers, poking its proboscis into them, ‘just as if it was a regular bee,’ thought Alice.

Then came another of those melancholy little sighs, and this time the poor Gnat really seemed to have sighed itself away, for, when Alice looked up, there was nothing whatever to be seen on the twig, and, as she was getting quite chilly with sitting still so long, she got up and walked on.

Alice stood looking after it, almost ready to cry with vexation at having lost her dear little fellow-traveller so suddenly.

‘The sun was shining—’
Here Alice ventured to interrupt him.

“O Oysters, come and walk with us!”
The Walrus did beseech.
“A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
To give a hand to each.”

‘That was mean!’ Alice said indignantly. ‘Then I like the Carpenter best — if he didn’t eat so many as the Walrus.’

‘Not you!’ Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. ‘You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!’

So the two brothers went off hand-in-hand into the wood, and returned in a minute with their arms full of things — such as bolsters, blankets, hearth-rugs, table-cloths, dish-covers and coal-scuttles.

‘And all about a rattle!’ said Alice, still hoping to make them a little ashamed of fighting for such a trifle.