Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: A Mad Tea-Party

Under a tree in front of a house stood a long table, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea there.Between them sat a sleepy Dormouse, and the two friends were using it as a cushion and talking over its head.When they saw Alice coming, they cried, “No room! No room!” but Alice said, “There is plenty of room!” and sat down in a big armchair.

The March Hare said, “Have some wine,” but Alice looked all round the table and saw only tea.“Then it wasn’t very polite of you to offer it,” said Alice, and the Hare answered that it wasn’t very polite of her to sit down without being invited.The Hatter looked at her for a long time and said, “Your hair needs cutting,” and Alice told him that it was rude to make personal remarks.

Then the Hatter asked, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” and Alice thought, “Good, now we shall have some fun with riddles!”Alice said that she could guess the answer, and that she meant what she said, but the Hatter cried that this was not the same thing at all, because “I see what I eat” is not the same as “I eat what I see!”In the end nobody knew the answer to the riddle, not even the Hatter, so Alice gave it up and sighed that they should not waste time on riddles with no answers.

Next the Hatter took out his watch, which told the day of the month but not the hour, and he grumbled that it was two days wrong because the March Hare had put butter in the works.“Does your watch tell you what year it is?” asked the Hatter, and Alice said that it did not, because one year lasts such a long time; “Which is just the case with mine,” said the Hatter.The Hatter said that he had sung at the Queen of Hearts’ concert, and the Queen had shouted, “He is murdering the time! Off with his head!”

Since then Time would do nothing for him, so it was always six o’clock, and the friends kept moving round the table because there was never time to wash the cups.The March Hare then asked the Dormouse to tell a story, and the sleepy Dormouse began: three little sisters lived at the bottom of a well, and they lived on treacle.“They would have been ill,” said Alice, and the Dormouse agreed that they were very ill; but when Alice doubted that there could be a well full of treacle, the Dormouse said crossly, “If you can’t be polite, finish the story yourself.”

The Dormouse went on about the sisters learning to draw everything that begins with an M, such as mousetraps, the moon and memory, but when the Hatter told Alice that she should not talk if she had nothing to say, she stood up in disgust and walked away.Looking back, she saw the Hatter and the March Hare trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot, and she said, “It is the stupidest tea party I ever was at in all my life!” — then she found a door in a tree, went in, and at last reached the beautiful garden.