blown up!'

Alice watched the White King as he slowly struggled up from bar to bar,
till at last she said, 'Why, you'll be hours and hours getting to the
table, at that rate. I'd far better help you, hadn't I?' But the King
took no notice of the question: it was quite clear that he could neither
hear her nor see her.

So Alice picked him up very gently, and lifted him across more slowly
than she had lifted the Queen, that she mightn't take his breath away:
but, before she put him on the table, she thought she might as well dust
him a little, he was so covered with ashes.

She said afterwards that she had never seen in all her life such a face
as the King made, when he found himself held in the air by an invisible
hand, and being dusted: he was far too much astonished to cry out, but
his eyes and his mouth went on getting larger and larger, and rounder
and rounder, till her hand shook so with laughing that she nearly let
him drop upon the floor.

'Oh! PLEASE don't make such faces, my dear!' she cried out, quite
forgetting that the King couldn't hear her. 'You make me laugh so that
I can hardly hold you! And don't keep your mouth so wide open! All the
ashes will get into it--there, now I think you're tidy enough!' she
added, as she smoothed his hair, and set him upon the table near the
Queen.

The King immediately fell flat on his back, and lay perfectly still: and
Alice was a little alarmed at what she had done, and went round the room
to see if she could find any water to throw over him. However, she could
find nothing but a bottle of ink, and when she got back with it she
found he had recovered, and he and the Queen were talking together in a
frightened whisper--so low, that Alice could hardly hear what they said.

The King was saying, 'I assure, you my dear, I turned cold to the very
ends of my whiskers!'

To which the Queen replied, 'You haven't got any whiskers.'

'The horror of that moment,' the King went on, 'I shall never, NEVER
forget!'

'You will, though,' the Queen said, 'if you don't make a memorandum of
it.'

Alice looked on with great interest as the King took an enormous
memorandum-book out of his pocket, and began writing. A sudden thought
struck her, and she took hold of the end of the pencil, which came some
way over his shoulder, and began writing for him.

The poor King looked puzzled and unhappy, and struggled with the pencil
for some time without saying anything; but Alice was too stro