Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: The Mock Turtle's Story

The Duchess linked her arm through Alice’s and said, “I am so glad to see you again, my dear!” in a surprisingly sweet voice.As they walked, the Duchess rested her sharp little chin on Alice’s shoulder and said, “Everything has a moral, if only you can find it.”She found a strange little moral for almost everything Alice said, until Alice began to feel quite worried.

Suddenly the Queen appeared in front of them, and the Duchess’s voice died away in the middle of a word.“Either you or your head must be off!” the Queen shouted, and the Duchess hurried away without another word.The croquet game went on, with the Queen quarrelling and shouting “Off with his head!” so often that soon almost every player had been led away by the soldiers.

At last the Queen asked Alice, “Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet? It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from.”Alice had never heard of it, so the Queen led her to a Gryphon sleeping in the sun and said, “Take this girl to hear the Mock Turtle’s history,” then hurried off.Once the Queen was gone, the Gryphon chuckled and said, “It’s all her fancy — they never really execute anybody, you know.”

They soon found the Mock Turtle sitting alone on a rock, sighing so sadly that Alice felt sorry for him at once.“This young lady wants to hear your history,” said the Gryphon, and the Mock Turtle answered in a deep, hollow voice, “Sit down, and don’t say a word until I’ve finished.”“Once,” he began at last, with a deep sigh, “I was a real Turtle,” and then he cried for a long while before he could say anything more.

“When we were young, we went to school under the sea,” he said. “The old master was a real turtle, but we called him the Tortoise, because he taught us.”He counted the strange subjects on his flippers: Reeling and Writhing, and then Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.There was also Mystery, old and new, and Seaography, and a lesson called Fainting in Coils, taught once a week by an old conger-eel.

“And how many hours of lessons a day?” asked Alice. “Ten hours the first day,” said the Mock Turtle, “nine the next, and so on.”“That’s why they’re called lessons,” the Gryphon explained, “because they lessen from day to day!” — and before Alice could ask what happened on the twelfth day, he had already changed the subject to games.