Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking Glass

CHAPTER 6: Humpty Dumpty

However, the egg only got larger and larger, and more and more human: when she had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes and a nose and mouth; and when she had come close to it, she saw clearly that it was HUMPTY DUMPTY himself. `It can't be anybody else!' she said to herself. `I'm as certain of it, as if his name were written all over his face.'

It might have been written a hundred times, easily, on that enormous face. Humpty Dumpty was sitting with his legs crossed, like a Turk, on the top of a high wall--such a narrow one that Alice quite wondered how he could keep his balance--and, as his eyes were steadily fixed in the opposite direction, and he didn't take the least notice of her, she thought he must be a stuffed figure after all.

`And how exactly like an egg he is!' she said aloud, standing with her hands ready to catch him, for she was every moment expecting him to fall.

`It's VERY provoking,' Humpty Dumpty said after a long silence, looking away from Alice as he spoke, `to be called an egg-- VERY!'

`I said you LOOKED like an egg, Sir,' Alice gently explained. `And some eggs are very pretty, you know' she added, hoping to turn her remark into a sort of a compliment.

`Some people,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking away from her as usual, `have no more sense than a baby!'

Alice didn't know what to say to this: it wasn't at all like conversation, she thought, as he never said anything to HER; in fact, his last remark was evidently addressed to a tree--so she stood and softly repeated to herself: --

            `Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall:
             Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
             All the King's horses and all the King's men
             Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty in his place again.'

`That last line is much too long for the poetry,' she added, almost out loud, forgetting that Humpty Dumpty would hear her.