Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking Glass

CHAPTER 1: Looking-Glass house (continued)

In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room. The very first thing she did was to look whether there was a fire in the fireplace, and she was quite pleased to find that there was a real one, blazing away as brightly as the one she had left behind. `So I shall be as warm here as I was in the old room,' thought Alice: `warmer, in fact, because there'll be no one here to scold me away from the fire. Oh, what fun it'll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and can't get at me!'

Then she began looking about, and noticed that what could be seen from the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but that all the rest was a different as possible. For instance, the pictures on the wall next the fire seemed to be all alive, and the very clock on the chimney-piece (you know you can only see the back of it in the Looking-glass) had got the face of a little old man, and grinned at her.

`They don't keep this room so tidy as the other,' Alice thought to herself, as she noticed several of the chessmen down in the hearth among the cinders: but in another moment, with a little `Oh!' of surprise, she was down on her hands and knees watching them. The chessmen were walking about, two and two!

`Here are the Red King and the Red Queen,' Alice said (in a whisper, for fear of frightening them), `and there are the White King and the White Queen sitting on the edge of the shovel--and here are two castles walking arm in arm--I don't think they can hear me,' she went on, as she put her head closer down, `and I'm nearly sure they can't see me. I feel somehow as if I were invisible--'

Here something began squeaking on the table behind Alice, and made her turn her head just in time to see one of the White Pawns roll over and begin kicking: she watched it with great curiosity to see what would happen next.