"If you like," answered the fairy.

"How far am I from home?"

"The farther you go, the nearer home you are."

Then the fairy lady gathered a bundle of poppies and gave it to Alice.
The next deep pool that they came to, she told her to throw it in.
Alice did so, and following it, laid her head upon it. That moment she
began to sink. Down and down she went, till at last she felt herself
lying on the long, thick grass at the bottom of the pool, with the
poppies under her head and the clear water high over it. Up through it
she saw the moon, whose bright face looked sleepy too, disturbed only
by the little ripples of the rain from the tall flowers on the edges of
the pool.

She fell fast asleep, and all night dreamed about home.

CHAPTER III.

Richard--which is name enough for a fairy story--was the son of a widow
in Alice's village. He was so poor that he did not find himself
generally welcome; so he hardly went anywhere, but read books at home,
and waited upon his mother. His manners, therefore, were shy, and
sufficiently awkward to give an unfavourable impression to those who
looked at outsides. Alice would have despised him; but he never came
near enough for that.

Now Richard had been saving up his few pence in order to buy an
umbrella for his mother; for the winter would come, and the one she had
was almost torn to ribands. One bright summer evening, when he thought
umbrellas must be cheap, he was walking across the market-place to buy
one: there, in the middle of it, stood an odd-looking little man,
actually selling umbrellas. Here was a chance for him! When he drew
nearer, he found that the little man, while vaunting his umbrellas to
the skies, was asking such absurdly small prices for them, that no one
would venture to buy one. He had opened and laid them all out at full
stretch on the market-place--about five-and-twenty of them, stick
downwards, like little tents--and he stood beside, haranguing the
people. But he would not allow one of the crowd to touch his umbrellas.
As soon as his eye fell upon Richard, he changed his tone, and said,
"Well, as nobody seems inclined to buy, I think, my dear umbrellas, we
had better be going home." Whereupon the umbrellas got up, with some
difficulty, and began hobbling away. The people stared at each other
with open mouths, for they saw that what they had taken for a lot of
umbrellas, was in reality a flock of black geese. A great turkey-cock
went gobblin