“The time and place of the Lory’s birth is uncertain; the egg from which it was hatched was most probably, to judge from the color of the bird, one of those magnificent Easter eggs which our readers have doubtless seen. The experiment of hatching an Easter egg is at any rate worth trying.”
After a lengthy and confusing description he winds up as follows:
“Having thus stated all we know and a great deal we don’t know on this interesting subject, we must conclude.”
Alice looked upon this domineering old bird of uncertain age quite as a matter of course, as, indeed, she looked upon everything that happened in Wonderland.
There is fun bubbling over in every situation. Sir John Tenniel has given us a clever picture of the wet, woe-begone animals, all clustering around the Mouse, who had undertaken to make them dry. “Ahem!” said the Mouse, with an important air, “are you all ready? This is the driest thing I know,” and off he rambled into some dull corner of English history, most probably taken out of Alice’s own lesson book, not unknown to Lewis Carroll.
The Caucas race was suggested by the Dodo as an excellent method for getting dry, and as it was a race in which everyone came in ahead, everyone of course was satisfied, and in the distribution of prizes no one was forgotten. Alice herself received her own thimble, which she fished out of her pocket, and which the Dodo solemnly handed back to her, “saying: ‘We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble,’ and when it had finished this short speech they all cheered.”
Dinah, the real Alice’s real cat, plays an important part in the drama of Wonderland, although she was left at home dozing in the sun; Alice mortally offended the Mouse, and frightened many of her bird friends almost to death, simply by bringing her into the conversation.
It is certainly delightful to follow in the footsteps of this dream-child of Lewis Carroll’s; we lose ourselves in the mazes of Wonderland, and even as we grow older we do not feel that we have to stoop in the least to pass through the portals.
There was a certain air of sociability in Wonderland that pleased Alice immensely, for her visiting-list was quite astonishing, and she was continually meeting new—well, not exactly people, but experiences. Her talk with a caterpillar during one of those periods when she was barely tall enough to peep over the mushroom on which he was sitting is “highly amusing and instructive.”
“‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.