“I’m glad you like it,” said Mr. Thimblefinger.

 

“Oh, hold on there!” protested Mr. Rabbit, “you are going too fast. I never said I liked it. I said it beat any story I ever heard, and so it does,—for length. I didn’t know that such a little chap could be so long-winded. It was such a long story that I’ve forgotten what the moral ought to be.”

 

“Why, I thought you said you didn’t believe much in stories that had morals tacked¹ to them,” remarked Mrs. Meadows.

 

“No doubt I did,” replied Mr. Rabbit,—“No doubt I did. But this story was long enough to have a dozen morals cropping out in different places, like dog fennel in a cow pasture.”

 

“Well,” said Mr. Thimblefinger, “there was a moral or two in the story, but I didn’t call attention to them in the telling, and I’ll not dwell on them now.”

 

“I thought it was a tolerably fair story,” said Buster John, yet with a tone of doubt.

 

“Oh, I thought it was splendid all the way through,” said Sweetest Susan.

 

“There are some stories that are hard to tell,” suggested Mrs. Meadows. “They go in such a rambledy-wambledy way that it’s not easy to keep the track of them. I remember I once heard Chickamy Crany Crow trying to repeat a story that she heard the Looking-glass Children tell. I never found head nor tail to it, but I sat and listened almost without shutting my eyes.”

 

“What was the story?” asked Sweetest Susan.

 

In reply, Mrs. Meadows said she would call Chickamy Crany Crow, and ask her to tell it. As usual, Chickamy Crany Crow was off at play with Tickle-My-Toes. They both came when Mrs. Meadows called them, and Chickamy Crany Crow, after some persuasion³, began to tell the story.

 

“One day,” she said, brushing her hair behind her ears with her fingers, “I wanted to see the Looking-glass Children. Tickle-My-Toes was off playing by himself, and I was lonesome; so I went to the Looking-glass, whirled it around in its frame, and waited for the children to come out. But they didn’t come. I called them, but they made no answer. I went close to the Glass, and looked in. At first, I couldn’t see anything; but after a while I saw, away off in the Glass, one of the children,—the one they all say looks like me. I called her; but she was so far off in the Glass that she couldn’t hear me, and, as she had her face turned the other way, she couldn’t see me.

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