Through the Looking-Glass
complaining tone: “I’ve a great mind to go and wake him, and see what
happens!”
At this moment her thoughts were interrupted by a loud shouting of
“Ahoy! Ahoy! Check!” and a Knight dressed in crimson armour came
galloping down upon her, brandishing a great club. Just as he reached
her, the horse stopped suddenly: “You’re my prisoner!” the Knight
cried, as he tumbled off his horse.
Startled as she was, Alice was more frightened for him than for herself
at the moment, and watched him with some anxiety as he mounted again.
As soon as he was comfortably in the saddle, he began once more “You’re
my—” but here another voice broke in “Ahoy! Ahoy! Check!” and Alice
looked round in some surprise for the new enemy.
This time it was a White Knight. He drew up at Alice’s side, and
tumbled off his horse just as the Red Knight had done: then he got on
again, and the two Knights sat and looked at each other for some time
without speaking. Alice looked from one to the other in some
bewilderment.
“She’s _my_ prisoner, you know!” the Red Knight said at last.
“Yes, but then _I_ came and rescued her!” the White Knight replied.
“Well, we must fight for her, then,” said the Red Knight, as he took up
his helmet (which hung from the saddle, and was something the shape of
a horse’s head), and put it on.
“You will observe the Rules of Battle, of course?” the White Knight
remarked, putting on his helmet too.
“I always do,” said the Red Knight, and they began banging away at each
other with such fury that Alice got behind a tree to be out of the way
of the blows.
“I wonder, now, what the Rules of Battle are,” she said to herself, as
she watched the fight, timidly peeping out from her hiding-place: “one
Rule seems to be, that if one Knight hits the other, he knocks him off
his horse, and if he misses, he tumbles off himself—and another Rule
seems to be that they hold their clubs with their arms, as if they were
Punch and Judy—What a noise they make when they tumble! Just like a
whole set of fire-irons falling into the fender! And how quiet the
horses are! They let them get on and off them just as if they were
tables!”
Another Rule of Battle, that Alice had not noticed, seemed to be that
they always fell on their heads, and the battle ended with their both
falling off in this way, side by side: when they got up again, they
shook hands, and then the Red Knight mounted and galloped off.
“It was a glorious victory, wasn’t it?” said the White Knight, as he
came up panting.
“I don’t know,” Alice said doubtfully. “I don’t want to be anybody’s
prisoner. I want to be a Queen.”
“So you will, when you’ve crossed the next brook,” said the White
Knight. “I’ll see you safe to the end of the wood—and then I must go
back, you know. That’s the end of my move.”
“Thank you very much,” said Alice. “May I help you off with your
helmet?” It was evidently more than he could manage by himself;
however, she managed to shake him out of it at last.
“Now one can breathe more easily,” said the Knight, putting back his
shaggy hair with both hands, and turning his gentle face and large mild
eyes to Alice. She thought she had never seen such a strange-looking
soldier in all her life.
He was dressed in tin armour, which seemed to fit him very badly, and
he had a queer-shaped little deal box fastened across his shoulder,
upside-down, and with the lid hanging open. Alice looked at it with
great curiosity.
“I see you’re admiring my little box.” the Knight said in a friendly
tone. “It’s my own invention—to keep clothes and sandwiches in. You see
I carry it upside-down, so that the rain can’t get in.”
“But the things can get _out_,” Alice gently remarked. “Do you know the
lid’s open?”
“I didn’t know it,” the Knight said, a shade of vexation passing over
his face. “Then all the things must have fallen out! And the box is no
use without them.” He unfastened it as he spoke, and was just going to
throw it into the bushes, when a sudden thought seemed to strike him,
and he hung it carefully on a tree. “Can you guess why I did that?” he
said to Alice.
Alice shook her head.
“In hopes some bees may make a nest in it—then I should get the honey.”
“But you’ve got a bee-hive—or something like one—fastened to the
saddle,” said Alice.
“Yes, it’s a very good bee-hive,” the Knight said in a discontented
tone, “one of the best kind. But not a single bee has come near it yet.
And the other thing is a mouse-trap. I suppose the mice keep the bees
out—or the bees keep the mice out, I don’t know which.”
“I was wondering what the mouse-trap was for,” said Alice. “It isn’t
very likely there would be any mice on the horse’s back.”
“Not very likely, perhaps,” said the Knight: “but if they _do_ come, I
don’t choose to have them running all about.”
“You see,” he went on after a pause, “it’s as well to be provided for
_everything_. That’s the reason the horse has all those anklets round
his feet.”
“But what are they for?” Alice asked in a tone of great curiosity.
“To guard against the bites of sharks,” the Knight replied. “It’s an
invention of my own. And now help me on. I’ll go with you to the end of
the wood—What’s the dish for?”
“It’s meant for plum-cake,” said Alice.
“We’d better take it with us,” the Knight said. “It’ll come in handy if
we find any plum-cake. Help me to get it into this bag.”
This took a very long time to manage, though Alice held the bag open
very carefully, because the Knight was so _very_ awkward in putting in
the dish: the first two or three times that he tried he fell in himself
instead. “It’s rather a tight fit, you see,” he said, as they got it in
a last; “There are so many candlesticks in the bag.” And he hung it to
the saddle, which was already loaded with bunches of carrots, and
fire-irons, and many other things.
“I hope you’ve got your hair well fastened on?” he continued, as they
set off.
“Only in the usual way,” Alice said, smiling.
“That’s hardly enough,” he said, anxiously. “You see the wind is so
_very_ strong here. It’s as strong as soup.”
“Have you invented a plan for keeping the hair from being blown off?”
Alice enquired.
“Not yet,” said the Knight. “But I’ve got a plan for keeping it from
_falling_ off.”
“I should like to hear it, very much.”
“First you take an upright stick,” said the Knight. “Then you make your
hair creep up it, like a fruit-tree. Now the reason hair falls off is
because it hangs _down_—things never fall _upwards_, you know. It’s a
plan of my own invention. You may try it if you like.”
It didn’t sound a comfortable plan, Alice thought, and for a few
minutes she walked on in silence, puzzling over the idea, and every now
and then stopping to help the poor Knight, who certainly was _not_ a
good rider.
Whenever the horse stopped (which it did very often), he fell off in
front; and whenever it went on again (which it generally did rather
suddenly), he fell off behind. Otherwise he kept on pretty well, except
that he had a habit of now and then falling off sideways; and as he
generally did this on the side on which Alice was walking, she soon
found that it was the best plan not to walk _quite_ close to the horse.
“I’m afraid you’ve not had much practice in riding,” she ventured to
say, as she was helping him up from his fifth tumble.
The Knight looked very much surprised, and a little offended at the
remark. “What makes you say that?” he asked, as he scrambled back into
the saddle, keeping hold of Alice’s hair with one hand, to save himself
from falling over on the other side.
“Because people don’t fall off quite so often, when they’ve had much
practice.”
“I’ve had plenty of practice,” the Knight said very gravely: “plenty of
practice!”
Alice could think of nothing better to say than “Indeed?” but she said
it as heartily as she could. They went on a little way in silence after
this, the Knight with his eyes shut, muttering to himself, and Alice
watching anxiously for the next tumble.
“The great art of riding,” the Knight suddenly began in a loud voice,
waving his right arm as he spoke, “is to keep—” Here the sentence ended
as suddenly as it had begun, as the Knight fell heavily on the top of
his head exactly in the path where Alice was walking. She was quite
frightened this time, and said in an anxious tone, as she picked him
up, “I hope no bones are broken?”
“None to speak of,” the Knight said, as if he didn’t mind breaking two
or three of them. “The great art of riding, as I was saying, is—to keep
your balance properly. Like this, you know—”
He let go the bridle, and stretched out both his arms to show Alice
what he meant, and this time he fell flat on his back, right under the
horse’s feet.
“Plenty of practice!” he went on repeating, all the time that Alice was
getting him on his feet again. “Plenty of practice!”
“It’s too ridiculous!” cried Alice, losing all her patience this time.
“You ought to have a wooden horse on wheels, that you ought!”
“Does that kind go smoothly?” the Knight asked in a tone of great
interest, clasping his arms round the horse’s neck as he spoke, just in
time to save himself from tumbling off again.
“Much more smoothly than a live horse,” Alice said, with a little
scream of laughter, in spite of all she could do to prevent it.
“I’ll get one,” the Knight said thoughtfully to himself. “One or
two—several.”
There was a short silence after this, and then the Knight went on
again. “I’m a great hand at inventing things. Now, I daresay you
noticed, that last time you picked me up, that I was looking rather
thoughtful?”
“You _were_ a little grave,” said Alice.
“Well, just then I was inventing a new way of getting over a gate—would
you like to hear it?”
“Very much indeed,” Alice said politely.
“I’ll tell you how I came to think of it,” said the Knight. “You see, I
said to myself, ‘The only difficulty is with the feet: the _head_ is
high enough already.’ Now, first I put my head on the top of the
gate—then I stand on my head—then the feet are high enough, you
see—then I’m over, you see.”
“Yes, I suppose you’d be over when that was done,” Alice said
thoughtfully: “but don’t you think it would be rather hard?”
“I haven’t tried it yet,” the Knight said, gravely: “so I can’t tell
for certain—but I’m afraid it _would_ be a little hard.”
He looked so vexed at the idea, that Alice changed the subject hastily.
“What a curious helmet you’ve got!” she said cheerfully. “Is that your
invention too?”
The Knight looked down proudly at his helmet, which hung from the
saddle. “Yes,” he said, “but I’ve invented a better one than that—like
a sugar loaf. When I used to wear it, if I fell off the horse, it
always touched the ground directly. So I had a _very_ little way to
fall, you see—But there _was_ the danger of falling _into_ it, to be
sure. That happened to me once—and the worst of it was, before I could
get out again, the other White Knight came and put it on. He thought it
was his own helmet.”
The knight looked so solemn about it that Alice did not dare to laugh.
“I’m afraid you must have hurt him,” she said in a trembling voice,
“being on the top of his head.”
“I had to kick him, of course,” the Knight said, very seriously. “And
then he took the helmet off again—but it took hours and hours to get me
out. I was as fast as—as lightning, you know.”
“But that’s a different kind of fastness,” Alice objected.
The Knight shook his head. “It was all kinds of fastness with me, I can
assure you!” he said. He raised his hands in some excitement as he said
this, and instantly rolled out of the saddle, and fell headlong into a
deep ditch.
Alice ran to the side of the ditch to look for him. She was rather
startled by the fall, as for some time he had kept on very well, and