e Queen's arm and said, "Think, my dear, she
is but a child!"

The Queen turned from him with a scowl and said to the Knave, "Turn them
o-ver!"

The Knave did so, with one foot.

"Get up!" said the Queen in a shrill loud voice, and the three men
jumped up, at once, and bowed to the King, and Queen and to the whole
crowd.

"Leave off that!" screamed the Queen; "you make me gid-dy." Then she
turned to the rose tree and asked, "What have you been do-ing here?"

"May it please your ma-jes-ty," said Two, and went down on one knee as
he spoke, "we were try-ing--"

"I see!" said the Queen, who in the mean time had seen that some of the
ros-es were paint-ed red and some were still white. "Off with their
heads!" and the crowd moved on, while three of the sol-diers stayed to
cut off the heads of the poor men, who ran to Al-ice for help.

"They shan't hurt you," she said, as she hid them in a large flow-er pot
that stood near. The three sol-diers walked round and looked for them a
short while, then marched off.

"Are their heads off?" shout-ed the Queen.

"Their heads are gone, if it please your ma-jes-ty," the sol-diers
shouted back.

"That's right!" shouted the Queen. "Can you play cro-quet?" she asked
Al-ice.

"Yes," shouted Al-ice.

"Come on then!" roared the Queen, and Al-ice went on with them.

"It's--it's a fine day!" said a weak voice at her side. It was the White
Rab-bit who peeped up in-to her face.

"Yes," said Al-ice: "where's the Duch-ess?"

"Hush! Hush!" said the Rab-bit, in a low tone. He looked back as he
spoke, then raised up on tip-toe, put his mouth close to her ear and
whis-pered, "She's to have her head cut off."

"What for?" asked Al-ice.

"Did you say, 'What a pit-y!'?" the Rab-bit asked.

"No, I didn't," said Al-ice: "I don't think it's at all a pit-y. I said
'What for?'"

[Illustration]

"She boxed the Queen's ears--" the Rab-bit be-gan. Al-ice gave a lit-tle
scream of joy.

"Oh, hush!" the Rab-bit whis-pered in a great fright. "The Queen will
hear you! You see she came late, and the Queen said--"

"Each one to his place!" shout-ed the Queen in a loud voice, and peo-ple
ran this way and that in great haste and soon each one had found his
place, and the game be-gan.

Al-ice thought she had nev-er seen such a strange cro-quet ground in all
her life: it was all ridges; the balls were live hedge-hogs; the
mal-lets were live birds, and the sol-diers bent down and stood on their