you to sit down on when you worked, and on the
table were all sorts of tiny little tools--awls and brads they looked
like--and pipe-stems and broken bowls of pipes and mouthpieces, for our
rescued Chinaman was a pipe-mender by trade. There wasn't much else in
the room except the smell, and that seemed to fill it choke-full. The
smell seemed to have all sorts of things in it--glue and gunpowder, and
white garden lilies and burnt fat, and it was not so easy to breathe as
plain air.

Then a Chinese lady came in. She had green-grey trousers, shiny like
varnish, and a blue gown, and her hair was pulled back very tight, and
twisted into a little knob at the back.

She wanted to go down on the floor before Alice, but we wouldn't let
her. Then she said a great many things that we feel sure were very nice,
only they were in Chinese, so we could not tell what they were.

And the Chinaman said that his mother also wanted Alice to walk on her
head--not Alice's own, of course, but the mother's.

I wished we had stayed longer, and tried harder to understand what they
said, because it was an adventure, take it how you like, that we're not
likely to look upon the like of again. Only we were too flustered to see
this.

We said, "Don't mention it," and things like that; and when Dicky said,
"I think we ought to be going," Oswald said so too.

Then they all began talking Chinese like mad, and the Chinese lady came
back and suddenly gave Alice a parrot.

It was red and green, with a very long tail, and as tame as any pet fawn
I ever read about. It walked up her arm and round her neck, and stroked
her face with its beak. And it did not bite Oswald or Alice, or even
Dicky, though they could not be sure at first that it was not going to.

We said all the polite things we could, and the old lady made thousands
of hurried Chinese replies, and repeated many times, "All litey, John,"
which seemed to be all the English she knew.

We never had so much fuss made over us in all our lives. I think it was
that that upset our calmness, and seemed to put us into a sort of silly
dream that made us not see what idiots we were to hurry off from scenes
we should never again behold. So we went. And the youthful Celestial saw
us safely to the top of Bullamy's Stairs, and left us there with the
parrot and floods of words that seemed all to end in double "e."

We wanted to show him to the others, but he would not come, so we
rejoined our anxious rela