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Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland
Kapitel 1:
Down the rabbit-hole, Lewis Carroll, Seite 3 ( von 3 )
"No, I'll look first," she said, "and see whether it's marked
'poison' or
not;" for she had read several nice little stories about children who had
got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because
they would not
remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a
red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your
finger very
deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if
you drink much from a bottle marked "poison," it is almost certain to
disagree with you, sooner or later.
However, this bottle was
not marked
"poison," so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice,
(it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple,
roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off.
**********
"What a curious feeling!" said Alice; "I must be shutting up
like a telescope."
And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face brightened
up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the little
door into that lovely garden. First, however, she waited for a few minutes to
see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about
this; "for it might end, you know," said Alice to herself, "in
my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like
then?" And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after
the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a
thing.
After a while, finding that nothing more happened, she decided on going into
the garden at once; but, alas for poor Alice! when she got to the door, she
found she had forgotten the little golden key, and when she went back to the
table for it, she found she could not possibly reach it: she could see it quite
plainly through the glass, and she tried her best to climb up one of the legs
of the table, but it was too slippery; and when she had tired herself out with
trying, the poor little thing sat down and cried.
"Come, there's no use in crying like that!" said Alice to herself,
rather sharply; "I advise you to leave off this minute!" She
generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it,)
and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes;
and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself
in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child
was very fond of pretending to be two people. "But it's no use now,"
thought poor Alice, "to pretend to be two people! Why, there's hardly
enough of me left to make
one respectable
person!"
Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she
opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words "EAT
ME" were beautifully marked in currants. "Well, I'll eat it,"
said Alice, "and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if
it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I'll get
into the garden, and I don't care which happens!"
She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, "Which way? which
way?" holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was
growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size:
to be sure, this is what generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had
got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to
happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common
way.
So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.
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