Perhaps it was just here that the children’s merriment broke forth; the idea of Alice being nine feet high was too ridiculous, but the poor dream “Alice” didn’t think so, for she sat down and began to cry again.
“‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ said Alice, ‘a great girl like you’ (she might well say this) ‘to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment I tell you!’ But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears until there was a large pool all around her about four inches deep and reaching half down the hall.”
This change she found more puzzling still: everything seemed mixed up, the Multiplication Table, Geography, even the verses which had been familiar to her from babyhood. She tried to say “How doth the little busy bee,” but the words would not come right; instead she began repeating, in a hoarse, strange voice, the following noble lines:
“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 spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!”
Naturally this produced a sensation, for where is the child who speaks English who does not know that the busy bee “improves the shining hours!”
When the book was translated into French, however, this odd little rhyme not being known to the French children, the translator, M. Henri Bué, had to substitute something else which they could understand—one of their own French rhymes made into a parody of La Fontaine’s “Maître Corbeau” (Master Raven).
When Alice began to shrink again, she went suddenly splash into that immense pool of tears she had shed when she was nine feet high. Now she was only two feet high and the water was up to her chin. It was so salty, being tear-water, that she thought she had fallen into the sea, and in this sly fashion Lewis Carroll managed to smuggle in a timely word about the sad way some little girls have of shedding “oceans of tears” on the most trifling occasion.
It was on this briny trip that she fell in with the numbers of queer animals who had also taken refuge in the “Pool of Tears,” from the Mouse to the Lory, who had all fallen into the water and were eagerly swimming toward the shore. They gained it at last and sat there, “the birds with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close to them, and all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable,” including Alice herself, whose long hair hung wet and straggling on her shoulders.
The Lory, of all the odd animals, was probably the oddest. Alice found herself talking familiarly with them all, and entering into quite a lengthy argument with the Lory in particular about how to get dry. But the Lory “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 nothing more to be said.”
Lewis Carroll himself made some interesting notes on the life history of this remarkable animal, which were first produced in The Rectory Umbrella long before he thought of popping it into “Wonderland.” “This creature,” he writes, “is, we believe, a species of parrot. Southey informs us that it is a bird of gorgeous plumery [plumage], and it is our private opinion that there never existed more than one, whose history, as far as practicable, we will now lay before our readers.”