Through the Looking Glass

“Then two are cheaper than one?” Alice said in a surprised tone, taking out her purse.

“Only you MUST eat them both, if you buy two,” said the Sheep.

“Then I'll have ONE, please,” said Alice, as she put the money down on the counter. For she thought to herself, “They mightn't be at all nice, you know.”

The Sheep took the money, and put it away in a box: then she said “I never put things into people's hands—that would never do—you must get it for yourself.” And so saying, she went off to the other end of the shop, and set the egg upright on a shelf.

“I wonder WHY it wouldn't do?” thought Alice, as she groped her way among the tables and chairs, for the shop was very dark towards the end. “The egg seems to get further away the more I walk towards it. Let me see, is this a chair? Why, it's got branches, I declare! How very odd to find trees growing here! And actually here's a little brook! Well, this is the very queerest shop I ever saw!”

So she went on, wondering more and more at every step, as everything turned into a tree the moment she came up to it, and she quite expected the egg to do the same.

Chapter VI

HUMPTY DUMPTY

However, the egg only got larger and larger, and more and more human: when she had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes and a nose and mouth; and when she had come close to it, she saw clearly that it was HUMPTY DUMPTY himself. “It can't be anybody else!” she said to herself. “I'm as certain of it, as if his name were written all over his face.”

It might have been written a hundred times, easily, on that enormous face. Humpty Dumpty was sitting with his legs crossed, like a Turk, on the top of a high wall—such a narrow one that Alice quite wondered how he could keep his balance—and, as his eyes were steadily fixed in the opposite direction, and he didn't take the least notice of her, she thought he must be a stuffed figure after all.

“And how exactly like an egg he is!” she said aloud, standing with her hands ready to catch him, for she was every moment expecting him to fall.