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down! I am so VERY tired of being all alone here!'

As she said this she looked down at her hands, and was
surprised to see that she had put on one of the Rabbit's little
white kid gloves while she was talking. `How CAN I have done
that?' she thought. `I must be growing small again.' She got up
and went to the table to measure herself by it, and found that,
as nearly as she could guess, she was now about two feet high,
and was going on shrinking rapidly: she soon found out that the
cause of this was the fan she was holding, and she dropped it
hastily, just in time to avoid shrinking away altogether.

`That WAS a narrow escape!' said Alice, a good deal frightened at
the sudden change, but very glad to find herself still in
existence; `and now for the garden!' and she ran with all speed
back to the little door: but, alas! the little door was shut
again, and the little golden key was lying on the glass table as
before, `and things are worse than ever,' thought the poor child,
`for I never was so small as this before, never! And I declare
it's too bad, that it is!'

As she said these words her foot slipped, and in another
moment, splash! she was up to her chin in salt water. Her first
idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, `and in that
case I can go back by railway,' she said to herself. (Alice had
been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the general
conclusion, that wherever you go to on the English coast you find
a number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in
the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and
behind them a railway station.) However, she soon made out that
she was in the pool of tears which she had wept when she was nine
feet high.

`I wish I hadn't cried so much!' said Alice, as she swam about,
trying to find her way out. `I shall be punished for it now, I
suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That WILL be a queer
thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer to-day.'

Just then she heard something splashing about in the pool a
little way off, and she swam nearer to make out what it was: at
first she thought it must be a walrus or hippopotamus, but then
she remembered how small she was now, and she soon made out that
it was only a mouse that had slipped in like herself.

`Would it be of any use, now,' thought Alice, `to speak to this
mouse? Everything is so out-of-the-way down here, that I should
think very likely it can talk: at any rate, there's no harm in
trying.' So she began: `O Mouse, do you know the way out of
this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O Mouse!'
(Alice thought this must be the right way of speaking to a mouse:
she had never done such a thing before, but she remembered having
seen in her brother's Latin Grammar, `A mouse--of a mouse--to a

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