Alice in Wonderland, Part 5: The Mock Turtle's Story

No sooner had the croquet game fallen apart than the Queen turned to Alice and asked whether she had seen the Mock Turtle yet. Alice confessed that she didn't even know what a Mock Turtle was. It was, the Queen explained, as though nothing could be more obvious, the thing that Mock Turtle soup was made from. Then she led Alice to a Gryphon, a creature with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion, which was stretched out asleep in the sunshine. Waking it with a sharp word, she ordered it to take the girl to hear the Mock Turtle's history.

The Gryphon waited until the Queen was well out of earshot before it sat up and chuckled. All those orders to cut off heads, it assured Alice, were pure show: nobody was ever actually executed. Somewhat reassured, Alice followed it down to the shore, where they found the Mock Turtle sitting alone on a ledge of rock, sighing heavily. Alice asked what its sorrow was, and the Gryphon replied, rather unkindly, that it had no sorrow at all; it simply enjoyed being miserable.

It was some time before the Mock Turtle, its eyes full of tears, could be persuaded to begin. "Once," it said finally, after a very long sigh, "I was a real Turtle." There followed a silence so long that Alice was on the point of thanking it for its interesting story and leaving. When they were little, it went on, they had gone to school in the sea, where their teacher had been an old Turtle. "We called him Tortoise because he taught us," it added angrily, when Alice asked why. Both creatures stared at her for not having worked that out by herself.

The lessons, it turned out, had been unlike any that Alice had ever heard of. There was Reeling and Writhing, for a start, followed by the four branches of Arithmetic: Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision. There was Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography, and Drawling, Stretching and Fainting in Coils, which were taught by an old conger eel who came once a week. Alice, who had never heard so many puns in a single afternoon, was too polite to point them out.

When she asked how many hours a day they had spent on lessons, the Mock Turtle answered that it had been ten hours on the first day and nine on the second. After that, there was one hour fewer every day. "That's the reason they're called lessons," the Gryphon remarked, "because they lessen from day to day." Alice thought this over carefully and asked what happened on the twelfth day, at which point the Gryphon declared, in a tone that allowed no argument, that they had talked about lessons quite enough.

Instead, the two creatures performed a dance called the Lobster Quadrille, solemnly going round and round Alice and treading on her toes whenever they came too close. Then the Mock Turtle, its voice choked with sobs, began a song about beautiful soup. It had barely reached the second verse when, somewhere far off, a voice announced that the trial was about to start. The Gryphon grabbed Alice by the hand and set off at a run, without even waiting for the song to finish. All the way along the shore, the Mock Turtle's mournful voice followed them, growing fainter and fainter.