no toys to play with, and oh! ever so many lessons to learn! No, I’ve
made up my mind about it; if I’m Mabel, I’ll stay down here! It’ll be
no use their putting their heads down and saying ‘Come up again, dear!’
I shall only look up and say ‘Who am I then? Tell me that first, and
then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down
here till I’m somebody else’—but, oh dear!” cried Alice, with a sudden
burst of tears, “I do wish they _would_ put their heads 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, 

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