The room suddenly got on to its legs, like the food and the families during Alice's feast in the “Looking Glass,” and swung round, lurching from side to side, and causing the fire to run into the gas and the gas to fly out of the window.
“I—don't—understand,” Jeremy stammered.
“Well, if you don't understand in half a shake,” said Uncle Samuel, “you won't see any of the show at all. Go on. Wash your face. There are streaks of dirt all down it as though you were a painted Indian; stick on your cap and coat and boots and come along.”
Exactly as one moves in sleep so Jeremy now moved. He had once had a wonderful dream, in which he had been at a meal that included every thing that he had most loved—fish-cakes, sausages, ices, strawberry jam, sponge-cake, chocolates, and scrambled eggs—and he had been able to eat, and eat, and had never been satisfied, and had never felt sick—a lovely dream.
He often thought of it. And now in the same bewildering fashion he found his boots and cap and coat and then, deliberately keeping from him the thought of the Pantomime lest he should suddenly wake up, he said:
“I'm ready, Uncle.”
Samuel Trefusia looked at him.
“You're a strange kid,” he said; “you take everything so quietly—but, thank God, I don't understand children.”
“There's Hamlet,” said Jeremy, wondering whether perhaps the dream would extend to his friend. “I suppose he can't come too.”
“No, he certainly can't,” said Uncle Samuel grimly.