anxiously over his shoulder as he spoke, and then raised himself upon tiptoe,

put his mouth close to her ear, and whispered “She’s under sentence

of execution.”


“What for?” said Alice.


“Did you say ‘What a pity!’?” the Rabbit asked.


“No, I didn’t,” said Alice: “I don’t think

it’s at all a pity. I said ‘What for?’”


“She boxed the Queen’s ears—” the Rabbit began. Alice

gave a little scream of laughter. “Oh, hush!” the Rabbit whispered

in a frightened tone. “The Queen will hear you! You see, she came rather

late, and the Queen said—”


“Get to your places!” shouted the Queen in a voice of thunder, and

people began running about in all directions, tumbling up against each other;

however, they got settled down in a minute or two, and the game began. Alice

thought she had never seen such a curious croquet-ground in her life; it was

all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live

flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their

hands and feet, to make the arches.


The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she

succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm,

with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely

straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it

would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled

expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got

its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that

the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides

all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted

to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up

and walking off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion

that it was a very difficult game indeed.