Alice in Wonderland: A Mad Tea Party

In bold: key vocabulary. Tap any word in the text to see its definition.

Under a tree in front of the house, there was a table set for tea, and at it sat the March Hare and the Hatter, with a Dormouse fast asleep between them. The other two were using the sleeping Dormouse as a cushion and talking over its head. The table was large, but the three of them were crowded together at one corner. "No room! No room!" they cried out when they saw Alice coming.

"There's plenty of room!" said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large armchair at the end of the table. The March Hare offered her some wine, but when Alice looked around, there was nothing on the table but tea. "I don't see any wine," she remarked. "There isn't any," said the March Hare. "Then it wasn't very civil of you to offer it," said Alice angrily.

The Hatter, who had been staring at her with great curiosity, asked her why a raven is like a writing-desk. "Come, we shall have some fun now," thought Alice. "I'm glad they've begun asking riddles." She said aloud that she believed she could guess the answer. The March Hare asked whether she meant that she could find the answer, and Alice replied that she did. "Then you should say what you mean," said the Hare. "I do," Alice hastily replied, "at least I mean what I say. That's the same thing, you know."

The Hatter took out his watch, looked at it uneasily, shook it, and held it to his ear. "What day of the month is it?" he asked. Alice thought for a moment and said it was the fourth. "Two days wrong!" sighed the Hatter. "I told you butter wouldn't suit the works," he added, looking angrily at the March Hare. Nobody seemed to notice that Alice had never received an answer about the raven.

Alice asked why they were all sitting at the same table with so many tea things laid out. The Hatter explained that it was always six o'clock. He said that he had quarreled with Time last March, just before the Hare went mad, at a concert given by the Queen of Hearts. Since then, Time refused to do anything he asked, and it was always six o'clock, which was tea-time. They had no time to wash the cups, so they kept moving around the table.

"But what happens when you come to the beginning again?" asked Alice. The March Hare interrupted with a yawn and suggested changing the subject, and the Hatter demanded that Alice tell a story. She said she didn't know one, so the Dormouse was woken up and told to tell one instead. It began a long, sleepy tale about three sisters who lived at the bottom of a well.

Alice's patience was wearing thin. She asked a question about the sisters, and the Hatter said that she was being rude, and that she could pour her own tea. She got up in disgust. "At any rate, I'll never go there again!" she said. "It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life." As she walked away, she noticed a door in the trunk of a tree. "That's curious," she thought. "But everything is curious today. I may as well go in."