Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Alice's Evidence

In her excitement Alice jumped to her feet without remembering how enormous she had grown, and her skirt swept the jury-box right over, spilling all twelve jurors onto the heads of the crowd below.“Oh, I beg your pardon!” she cried, and began scooping the jurors up as fast as she could, terrified they might die if she didn’t get them back into their box at once.She discovered she had accidentally set the Lizard in head-first, its little tail waving helplessly, and quickly turned it right side up again.

“The trial cannot proceed,” the King announced gravely, “until every juryman is back in his proper place — every one,” he added, staring hard at Alice.“What do you know about this business?” he demanded of her. “Nothing,” Alice answered, and when he pressed her further, she repeated, “Nothing whatever.”“That’s very important,” the King told the jury — until the White Rabbit whispered a correction, and the King hurriedly agreed that he had, of course, meant unimportant.

Suddenly the King pulled a small book from his pocket and read out, “Rule Forty-two: All persons more than a mile high to leave the court.”“I’m not a mile high,” Alice protested, but the King and Queen insisted she was nearly two — until Alice pointed out that he had clearly just invented the rule that very moment.“Then it ought to be Number One,” she said, and the King, looking flustered, snapped his notebook shut and told the jury to consider their verdict.

Before they could, the White Rabbit leapt up with fresh evidence: a folded paper that had just been found, addressed to no one and signed by no one, containing only a set of strange verses.“He must have imitated somebody else’s handwriting,” the King decided, and though nobody could find a single clear meaning in the verses, he insisted on reading deep significance into every line.“There they are!” he cried triumphantly, pointing at the tarts on the table, certain he had matched a line about giving and returning to the theft itself, though Alice was sure it was nonsense from beginning to end.

“Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said for perhaps the twentieth time that day, but the Queen cut him off entirely.“No, no!” she shouted. “Sentence first — verdict afterwards!” “Stuff and nonsense!” Alice said loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”“Off with her head!” the Queen screamed at the top of her voice — but by now Alice had grown to her full size, and nobody in the courtroom moved an inch.

“Who cares for you?” Alice said. “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” At that, the whole pack rose into the air and came flying down on top of her, and she gave a small scream and batted them away.She opened her eyes to find herself lying on the riverbank after all, her head in her sister’s lap, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves — and Alice realized, with a mix of relief and disappointment, that her whole wonderful, terrible adventure had only ever been a dream.