"However, if you ask a plain question, he must give you a plain answer,
for they are not allowed to tell downright lies in Fairyland."

"Don't ask him, Richard; you know you gave him a dreadful blow."

"I gave him what he deserved, and he owes me the same.--Hallo! which is
the way out?"

He wouldn't say _if you please_, because then it would not have been a
plain question.

"Down-stairs," hissed the owl, without ever lifting his eyes from the
book, which all the time he read upside down, so learned was he.

"On your honour, as a respectable old owl?" asked Richard.

"No," hissed the owl; and Richard was almost sure that he was not
really an owl. So he stood staring at him for a few moments, when all
at once, without lifting his eyes from the book, the owl said, "I will
sing a song," and began:--

"Nobody knows the world but me.
When they're all in bed, I sit up to see
I'm a better student than students all,
For I never read till the darkness fall;
And I never read without my glasses,
And that is how my wisdom passes.
Howlowlwhoolhoolwoolool.

"I can see the wind. Now who can do that?
I see the dreams that he has in his hat;
I see him snorting them out as he goes--
Out at his stupid old trumpet-nose.
Ten thousand things that you couldn't think
I write them down with pen and ink.
Howlowlwhooloolwhitit that's wit.

"You may call it learning--'tis mother-wit.
No one else sees the lady-moon sit
On the sea, her nest, all night, but the owl,
Hatching the boats and the long-legged fowl.
When the oysters gape to sing by rote,
She crams a pearl down each stupid throat.
Howlowlwhitit that's wit, there's a fowl!"

And so singing, he threw the book in Richard's face, spread out his
great, silent, soft wings, and sped away into the depths of the tree.
When the book struck Richard, he found that it was only a lump of wet
moss.

While talking to the owl he had spied a hollow behind one of the
branches. Judging this to be the way the owl meant, he went to see, and
found a rude, ill-defined staircase going down into the very heart of
the trunk. But so large was the tree that this could not have hurt it
in the least. Down this stair, then, Richard scrambled as best he
could, followed by Alice--not of her own will, she gave him clearly to
understand, but because she could do no better. Down, down they went,
slipping and falling sometimes, but never very far, because the stair