THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

And What Alice Found There

By Lewis Carroll

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Child of the pure, clear forehead
And dreaming eyes full of wonder!
Even though time moves fast, and you and I
Are far apart in age,
Your loving smile will surely welcome
This gift of a fairy-tale, given with love.

I have not seen your sunny face,
Nor heard your silver laughter;
No thought of me will find a place
In your life as you grow older—
It is enough that now you will listen
To my fairy-tale.

A tale begun on other days,
When summer suns were shining—
A simple rhythm that kept time
With the beat of our rowing—
Its echoes still live in memory,
Though the passing years might say "forget."

Come, listen then, before a voice of gloom,
Carrying news you won't want to hear,
Calls a tired, sad child
To an unwelcome bed!
We are only older children, dear,
Who are upset to find our bedtime near.

Outside, there is frost, blinding snow,
And the wild, stormy wind—
Inside, the fire glows warm,
And childhood feels safe and happy.
These magic words will hold your attention:
You won't even notice the howling storm.

And even though a small sad feeling
May shiver through this story,
For happy summer days now gone,
And summer's faded beauty—
It won't spoil with sadness
The joy of our fairy-tale.

Contents

• CHAPTER I. Looking-Glass House
• CHAPTER II. The Garden of Live Flowers
• CHAPTER III. Looking-Glass Insects
• CHAPTER IV. Tweedledum and Tweedledee
• CHAPTER V. Wool and Water
• CHAPTER VI. Humpty Dumpty
• CHAPTER VII. The Lion and the Unicorn
• CHAPTER VIII. "It's My Own Invention"
• CHAPTER IX. Queen Alice
• CHAPTER X. Shaking
• CHAPTER XI. Waking
• CHAPTER XII. Which Dreamed It?

CHAPTER I. Looking-Glass House

One thing was certain: the white kitten had nothing to do with it. It was the black kitten's fault, all of it. The white kitten had been getting its face washed by the mother cat, Dinah, for the last fifteen minutes—and had put up with it pretty well. So you can see the white kitten couldn't have caused any trouble.

Here's how Dinah washed her kittens' faces: first she held the poor kitten down by the ear with one paw. Then, with her other paw, she rubbed its face all over, starting at the nose and going the wrong way. Right now, she was hard at work on the white kitten, which lay still and tried to purr, probably feeling that this was all for its own good.

But the black kitten had already been washed earlier that afternoon. So while Alice sat curled up in the corner of a big armchair, half talking to herself and half asleep, the black kitten had been playing a wild game with a ball of yarn Alice had been trying to wind up. The kitten had rolled it back and forth until the whole thing came undone again. Now it lay spread across the rug, all knots and tangles, with the kitten chasing its own tail right in the middle of the mess.

"Oh, you naughty little thing!" cried Alice, scooping up the kitten and giving it a little kiss to let it know it was in trouble. "Really, Dinah should have taught you better manners! You should have, Dinah, you know you should!" she added, giving the older cat a disappointed look and trying to sound as cross as she could. Then she climbed back into the armchair, bringing the kitten and the yarn with her, and started winding the ball up again. But she didn't get very far, because she kept talking the whole time—sometimes to the kitten, sometimes to herself. Kitty sat properly on her lap, pretending to watch the winding, and now and then reached out a paw to touch the ball gently, as if she wanted to help if she could.

"Do you know what tomorrow is, Kitty?" Alice began. "You would have guessed if you'd been at the window with me—but Dinah was cleaning you up, so you couldn't see. I was watching the boys gather sticks for the bonfire, and it needs so many sticks, Kitty! But it got so cold, and it snowed so much, that they had to stop. Never mind, Kitty, we'll go see the bonfire tomorrow." Here Alice wrapped a few loops of yarn around the kitten's neck just to see how it looked. This caused a scramble, and the ball rolled onto the floor, unwinding yards and yards of yarn again.

"You know, I was so angry with you, Kitty," Alice continued once they were settled again. "When I saw all the trouble you had caused, I almost opened the window and put you out in the snow! And you would have deserved it, you naughty little darling! What do you have to say for yourself? Now, don't interrupt me!" she said, holding up one finger. "I'm going to list all your bad behavior. First: you squeaked twice while Dinah washed your face this morning. Now, you can't deny it, Kitty—I heard you! What's that you say?" (She pretended the kitten was answering back.) "Her paw poked your eye? Well, that's your fault for keeping your eyes open. If you'd shut them tight, it wouldn't have happened. Now, no more excuses—listen! Second: you pulled Snowdrop away by the tail just when I had put down her saucer of milk! What, you were thirsty? How do you know she wasn't thirsty too? And third: you unwound the whole ball of yarn while I wasn't looking!

"That's three things you did wrong, Kitty, and you haven't been punished for any of them yet. You know I'm saving up all your punishments for a week from Wednesday—Just imagine if someone saved up all my punishments!" she went on, talking more to herself than to the kitten. "What would happen at the end of a year? I suppose I'd be sent to prison when that day came. Or—let me think—suppose each punishment meant skipping a dinner. Then, on that terrible day, I'd have to skip fifty dinners at once! Well, I wouldn't mind that too much—I'd rather skip them than eat them!

"Do you hear the snow tapping on the window, Kitty? Doesn't it sound nice and soft? Just like someone is kissing the window from outside. I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, since it kisses them so gently? And then it tucks them in snugly, like a white blanket, and maybe it says, 'Go to sleep, my dears, until summer comes again.' And when they wake up in summer, Kitty, they dress in green and dance around whenever the wind blows—oh, that's such a pretty thought!" cried Alice, dropping the ball of yarn to clap her hands. "I really wish it were true! I'm sure the woods look sleepy in autumn, when the leaves turn brown.

"Kitty, can you play chess? Now, don't smile, dear—I'm asking seriously. Because when we played earlier, you watched as if you understood it! And when I said 'Check!' you purred! Well, it was a good check, Kitty, and I might have won if that annoying Knight hadn't come wiggling in among my pieces. Kitty, dear, let's pretend—"

Here I wish I could share all the things Alice used to say, starting with her favorite phrase, "Let's pretend." Just the day before, she'd had a long argument with her sister—all because Alice had said, "Let's pretend we're kings and queens." Her sister, who liked things to be exactly right, argued that they couldn't, since there were only two of them. In the end, Alice had said, "Well, you can be one of them, then, and I'll be all the rest." Another time, she had really scared her old nurse by suddenly shouting in her ear, "Nurse! Let's pretend that I'm a hungry hyena, and you're a bone!"

But that's getting away from Alice's talk with the kitten. "Let's pretend you're the Red Queen, Kitty! You know, I think if you sat up and folded your arms, you'd look just like her. Now do try it, there's a dear!" Alice grabbed the Red Queen chess piece from the table and set it in front of the kitten as an example to copy. But it didn't work—mainly, Alice said, because the kitten wouldn't fold its arms properly. So, to punish it, she held the kitten up to the mirror so it could see how sulky it looked. "And if you're not good right now," she added, "I'll put you right through into Looking-glass House. How would you like that?"

"Now, if you'll just listen, Kitty, and stop talking so much, I'll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First, there's the room you can see through the mirror—it looks just like our sitting room, except everything is backwards. I can see the whole room when I stand on a chair—all except the part behind the fireplace. Oh, I really wish I could see that part! I want to know if they have a fire there in winter. You can never tell, unless our fire smokes—then smoke appears in that room too. But that might just be a trick, to make it look like they have a fire. And the books are a bit like ours, except the words go the wrong way. I know this because I once held one of our books up to the mirror, and they held up a book in the other room too.

"How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty? I wonder if they'd give you milk there? Maybe Looking-glass milk isn't good to drink—Oh, but Kitty! Now here's the hallway. You can just catch a little peek of the hallway in Looking-glass House if you leave our sitting-room door wide open. It looks a lot like our hallway, as far as you can see—but who knows what it's like farther on. Oh, Kitty! Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could get through into Looking-glass House! I'm sure it has beautiful things inside! Let's pretend there's a way to get through, somehow, Kitty. Let's pretend the glass has turned soft, like thin fabric, so we can pass through it. Why, it's actually turning misty now, I declare! It'll be easy to get through—"

She was standing on the mantelpiece as she said this, though she hardly noticed how she had gotten up there. And sure enough, the glass really was starting to melt away, just like a bright, silvery mist.

In another moment, Alice had passed through the glass and jumped down lightly into the Looking-glass room. The very first thing she did was check whether there was a fire in the fireplace, and she was happy to find a real one, blazing just as brightly as the one she had left behind. "So I'll be just as warm here as I was in—"