pretty," said the March Hare. "It is only the
question of reducing beauty to the basis of practical utility that
confronts us."

"And how did it work?" asked Alice, very much interested.

[Illustration: "IN THE MATTER OF PERFUME IT WAS FINE"]

"Beautifully," said the Hatter. "Only it wouldn't burn--just why I
haven't been able to find out. But in the matter of perfume it was fine.
People who turned on their jets the first night soon found their houses
smelling like bowers of roses, and a great many of them liked it so much
that they turned on every jet in the house, and left them turned on all
day, so that in the mere matter of consumption twice as much of my
aromatic illuminating air was used in a week as the companies had
charged for under the old system, and we used the same metres, too. In
addition to this, as a mere life-saving device, my invention proved to
have a wonderful value. In the first place nobody could blow it out and
be found gas-fixturated the next morning----"

[Illustration: "NOBODY COULD BE GAS-FIXTURATED"]

"Good word that--so much more expressive than the old privately owned
dictionary word asphyxiated," said the March Hare.

The Hatter nodded his appreciation of the March Hare's compliment, and
admitted him once more to his good graces.

"And nobody could commit suicide with it the way they used to do with
the old kind of gas, because, you see, it was, after all, only hot air,
which is good for the lungs whichever way it's going, in or out. We use
hot air all the time in our Administration and it is wonderful what
results you can get from it," he went on. "But it wouldn't light. In
fact when anybody tried to light it, such was the pressure, it blew out
the match, which I regard, as an additional point in its favour. If we
have gas that blows out matches the minute the match is applied to it,
does not that reduce the chance of fire from the careless habit some
people have of throwing lighted matches into the waste-basket?"

"It most certainly does," said the White Knight gravely, and in such
tones of finality that Alice did not venture to dispute his assertion.

"We're all agreed upon that point," said the Hatter. "But there were
complaints of course. Some people, mostly capitalists who were rich
enough to have libraries of their own, complained that they couldn't
read nights because the gas wouldn't light. I replied that if they
wanted to read they could go to the Public Library, where