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Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland
Kapitel 5:
Advice from a caterpillar, Lewis Carroll, Seite 3 ( von 4 )
"Well, I should like to be a
little larger,
sir, if you wouldn't mind," said Alice: "three inches is such a
wretched height to be."
"It is a very good height indeed!" said the Caterpillar angrily,
rearing itself upright as it spoke (it was exactly three inches high).
"But I'm not used to it!" pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone. And
she thought to herself, "I wish the creatures wouldn't be so easily
offended."
"You'll get used to it in time," said the Caterpillar; and it put the
hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.
This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again. In a minute or
two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and yawned once or twice,
and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away into the
grass, merely remarking as it went, "One side will make you grow taller,
and the other side will make you grow shorter."
"One side of what? The other
side of what?" thought
Alice to herself.
"Of the mushroom," said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it
loud; and in another moment it was out of sight.
Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying to
make out which were the two sides of it; and, as it was perfectly round, she
found this a very difficult question. However, at last she stretched her arms
round it as far as they would go, and broke off a bit of the edge with each
hand.
"And now which is which?" she said to herself, and nibbled a little
of the right-hand bit to try the effect: the next moment she felt a violent
blow underneath her chin; it had struck her foot!
She was a good deal frightened by this very sudden change, but she felt that
there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking rapidly; so she set to work
at once to eat some of the other bit. Her chin was pressed so closely against
her foot, that there was hardly room to open her mouth; but she did it at last,
and managed to swallow a morsel of the left-hand bit.
**********
"Come, my head's free at last!" said Alice in a tone of delight,
which changed into alarm in another moment, when she found that her shoulders
were nowhere to be found: all she could see when she looked down, was an
immense length of neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a sea of green
leaves that lay far below her.
"What can
all that green stuff be?" said Alice. "And where
have my
shoulders go to? And oh, my poor hands, how is it I can't see you?" She
was moving them about as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow, except a
little shaking among the distant green leaves.
As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried
to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would
bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had just succeeded in
curving it down into a graceful zigzag, and was going to dive in among the
leaves, which she found to be nothing but the tops of the trees under which she
had been wandering, when a sharp hiss made her draw back in a hurry: a large
pigeon had flown into her face, and was beating her violently with its wings.
"Serpent!" screamed the Pigeon.
"I'm not a
serpent!" said Alice indignantly. "Let me alone!"
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