Alice admitted she didn’t know. The White Queen was in a great hurry because, as she said, once in Authorland it would only be possible to make haste slowly. They looked up the timetable and found any number of editions just leaving. As they were entering a compartment the guard came along, crying: “Here! You can’t go in there! That’s reserved for fairies”—but a very pleasant-looking woman who was already seated inside stuck out her head and said: “Oh, do let the little girl come in. Besides, she’s with the White Queen, who may ride anywhere.” So the guard let them in, with a good deal of grumbling, slammed the door and blew his whistle and they were off. The pleasant-faced woman smiled at Alice, and Alice took courage to ask:
“Are you a fairy, then?”
“No, my dear, but I write about them. It’s more fun than being one, really. My name is Rose Fyleman and I live part of the time in London and part of it in Fairy Hills—that’s the nice residence section of Authorland, you know.”
“What are your books, please?” Alice asked, primly.
“Oh, there’s Rose Fyleman’s Fairy Book, and The Fairy Flute, and The Fairy Green and Fairies and Chimneys—all poems—and The Rainbow Cat, whom I knew very well and admired no end. He used to walk about the Child’s Garden of Verse—that’s the little village green with flower-beds in Fairy Hills.”
Rose Fyleman lent Alice some of her books to read on the train. The White Queen slept in a corner, but finally sprang up, crying: “We’re here, we’re here!”
“But the train isn’t stopping,” protested Alice. Rose Fyleman and the White Queen laughed. “Silly,” said the White Queen, “it isn’t a train, it’s an edition, and editions never stop in Authorland. You just jump off anywhere.” And with that she jumped. So did Rose Fyleman, pausing to say: “You won’t mind it. Landing in a heap of books is such fun.” Alice finally summoned her courage and jumped, too. A man six feet tall and over caught her nicely and set her down right side up. Then he very politely introduced himself. He was Frederick Arnold Kummer, he said, and it was his business to catch girls and boys and set them down right side up. “With care,” he added.
Alice thanked him and took the two books he handed her, The First Days of Man and another called The First Days of Knowledge. “You won’t need these here,” he explained, “but you’ll find them very useful and probably interesting and maybe exciting when you go back.”
There was no trace of the White Queen, so Alice went down the road, picking her way among the books planted everywhere, until a white-haired and smiling old lady sent out her boy, Nils, to show her the way about. Nils said the white-haired woman was Selma Lagerlöf, and she had written for him two sets of wonderful adventures. He had been a rather bad boy and Selma Lagerlöf had turned him into an elf and later had sent him through animal land. “I’ll give you the books,” said Nils, picking out a couple that stood between two book ends at corners of the road. “Here they are—The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and The Further Adventures of Nils.”
Alice thought she should like to go back and talk with Selma Lagerlöf, whose smile had seemed mysterious and wonderful, but Nils was bent on showing her the animals. Of these there were quantities, and Nils knew them all, it appeared, and their owners.