dangerous getting off a train that doesn't move than off one that
does."

"I can see that," said. Alice. "That weasel, for instance, would have
been badly hurt if he had been thrown through the window of a moving
car."

"That's it exactly," said the Hatter. "As Alderman March Hare puts it,
we M. O. people are after the comfort and safety of the people first,
last and all the time. Everything else is a tertiary consideration
merely."

"What's tertiary?" asked Alice.

"Third," said the Hatter. "To come in third. It's a combination of
turtle and dromedary."

[Illustration: "REQUESTED THE HATTER TO CRACK A FILBERT FOR HIM"]

Just at this moment a man walking through the car stopped and requested
the Hatter to crack a filbert for him, which the Hatter cheerfully did.
The passer-by thanked him and paid him a cent, which the Hatter
immediately rang up on a small cash register on his vest, as required by
the laws of Blunderland.

"That's the way the Municipal Ownership of Teeth works," said the Hatter
as the man passed on, and then he resumed. "This street railway
business, however, was a much harder proposition than the Municipal
Ownership of Teeth. When we took the railways over of course we had to
run 'em on the old system until we'd learned the business. The
first thing we did was to get educated men for Motormen and
Conductors--polite fellows, you know, who'd stop a car when you asked
'em to, and when they started wouldn't do it with such a jerk that in
nine cases out of ten it was only the back door that kept the car from
being yanked clean from under your feet, letting you land in the street
behind."

"I know," said Alice. "Like a game of snap the whip."

"Exactly," said the Hatter. "Under the old method of starting a car you
never knew, when you were going home nights, whether you'd land in the
bosom of your family or in a basket of eggs somebody was bringing home
from market. So we advertised for polite motormen and conductors, and we
got a great lot of them, mostly retired druggists, floor-walkers, poets
and fellows like that, with a few ex-politicians thrown in to give tone
to the service, and we put them on, but they didn't know anything about
motoring, unfortunately. Somehow or other good manners and expert
motoring didn't seem to go together, and in consequence we had a fearful
lot of collisions at first. I don't think there was a whole back
platform in the outfit at the end of the week, no matter whi