Not a member of Pastebin yet?
Sign Up,
it unlocks many cool features!
- She glanced rather shyly at the real Queen as she said this, but her
- companion only smiled pleasantly, and said, “That’s easily managed. You
- can be the White Queen’s Pawn, if you like, as Lily’s too young to
- play; and you’re in the Second Square to begin with: when you get to
- the Eighth Square you’ll be a Queen—” Just at this moment, somehow or
- other, they began to run.
- Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how
- it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running
- hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do
- to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying “Faster! Faster!”
- but Alice felt she _could not_ go faster, though she had not breath
- left to say so.
- The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other
- things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they
- went, they never seemed to pass anything. “I wonder if all the things
- move along with us?” thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed
- to guess her thoughts, for she cried, “Faster! Don’t try to talk!”
- Not that Alice had any idea of doing _that_. She felt as if she would
- never be able to talk again, she was getting so much out of breath: and
- still the Queen cried “Faster! Faster!” and dragged her along. “Are we
- nearly there?” Alice managed to pant out at last.
- “Nearly there!” the Queen repeated. “Why, we passed it ten minutes ago!
- Faster!” And they ran on for a time in silence, with the wind whistling
- in Alice’s ears, and almost blowing her hair off her head, she fancied.
- “Now! Now!” cried the Queen. “Faster! Faster!” And they went so fast
- that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the
- ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite
- exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground,
- breathless and giddy.
- The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, “You may rest
- a little now.”
- Alice looked round her in great surprise. “Why, I do believe we’ve been
- under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!”
- “Of course it is,” said the Queen, “what would you have it?”
- “Well, in _our_ country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d
- generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time,
- as we’ve been doing.”
- “A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, _here_, you see, it
- takes all the running _you_ can do, to keep in the same place. If you
- want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as
- that!”
- Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Chapter 2 - The Garden of Live Flowers
Advertisement
