The First Time

The Queen had only one way of fixing all trou­ble, gre­at or small. ‘Off with his head!’ she said, not even in round. ‘I’ll fetch the guy mys­elf,’ said the King eager­ly, and he hur­ried off.

Ali­ce thought she might as well go back, and see how the game was going on, as she heard the Queen’s voice in the distance, screa­ming with pas­si­on. She had alre­a­dy heard her sen­tence three of the play­ers to be exe­cu­ted for having missed their turns, and she did not like the look of things at all, as the game was in such con­fu­si­on that she never knew whe­ther it was her turn or not. So she went in search of her hedgehog.

The hedge­hog was enga­ged in a fight with ano­ther hedge­hog, which see­med to Ali­ce an excel­lent oppor­tu­ni­ty for cro­que­ting one of them with the other: the only dif­fi­cul­ty was, that her fla­min­go was gone across to the other side of the gar­den, whe­re Ali­ce could see it try­ing in a hel­p­less sort of way to fly up into a tree.

By the time she had caught the fla­min­go and brought it back, the fight was over, and both the hedge­hogs were out of sight: ‘but it does­n’t mat­ter much,’ thought Ali­ce, ‘as all the arches are gone from this side of the ground.’ So she tucked it away under her arm, that it might not escape again, and went back for a litt­le more con­ver­sa­ti­on with her friend.