MORE PAGES FROM ALICE
...The Blue Queen and the Gibblet wanted to show Alice something.
'This,' said the Blue Queen, 'is a glass-room. It's made of glass so we can see into it. We can see everything that's going on in there. '
'It looks nice,' said Alice, 'what do you do in there?'
'WE don't do anything in the glass-room,' hissed the Gibblet, 'We put children in the glass-room.'
'Why?' said Alice.
'To fill them up with knowledge, of course,' said the Gibblet.
Alice looked in to the glass-room. There were rows and rows of children in there but they didn't seem to be being filled up with knowledge. Alice was puzzled. She remembered from...where was it?...before she fell down the hole...that when she went to school, there was a person there they called a 'teacher'. In the glass-room, there was no teacher.
'Excuse me,' said Alice, 'isn't there supposed to be a teacher in the glass-room?'
'There is a teacher in the glass-room,' said the Blue Queen.
'There is a teacher in the glass-room,' said the Gibblet.
Alice stared again. She didn't want to annoy them but she believed in saying true things. So she said, 'Where?'
'The teacher,' said the Blue Queen, 'is where the teacher is.'
'Very good,' said the Gibblet, 'exactly. The teacher is where the teacher is because the teacher couldn't be where the teacher is not.'
'We're not running out, you know,' said the Blue Queen.
'I didn't think you were running anywhere,' said Alice.
'No, no, no,' said the Blue Queen, 'we're not running out of teachers. We've got loads of them.'
'Loads of them,' repeated the Gibblet.
'But not actually here. In this Glass-room,' said Alice.
'We've told you,' said the Blue Queen, 'there is a teacher in the glass-room.'
'And if we've told you something is what it is, then it is!' said the Gibblet.
Alice tried to understand this but she couldn't.
Just then some heralds blew trumpets and called out:
'The Blue King is going to make an announcement! The Blue King is going to make an announcement!'
This made the Scribes very excited and they all wrote down, 'The Blue King is going to make an announcement.'
The Blue King stepped forward and said, 'I have good news. This year there will be no more poor people.'
At this, everyone started clapping and cheering. Even the Scribes stopped writing for a moment to clap and cheer before getting back to the hard work of writing, 'There will be no more poor people.'
'Where will they go?' said Alice.
Everyone went very quiet.
Then the Gibblet said, 'the poor people won't be anywhere, because they can't be anywhere if they're not there.'
The Scribes loved that too and scribbled that down.
Alice looked at her hand. She wondered if by saying it's not there, it would disappear. Or, as she was feeling a bit hungry, if she said that a sandwich was in front of her, it would appear.
She was just about to try when...
[the manuscript ends here]
