So Beautiful, You Won’t Resist It

May 25th, 2014

They had not gone far before they saw the Mock Turtle in the distance, sitting sad and lonely on a little ledge of rock, and, as they came nearer, Alice could hear him sighing as if his heart would break. She pitied him deeply. ‘What is his sorrow?’ she asked the Gryphon, and the Gryphon answered, very nearly in the same words as before, ‘It’s all his fancy, that: he hasn’t got no sorrow, you know. Come on!’

So they went up to the Mock Turtle, who looked at them with large eyes full of tears, but said nothing.

‘This here young lady,’ said the Gryphon, ‘she wants for to know your history, she do.’

‘I’ll tell it her,’ said the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow tone: ‘sit down, both of you, and don’t speak a word till I’ve finished.’

So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought to herself, ‘I don’t see how he can EVEN finish, if he doesn’t begin.’ But she waited patiently.

‘Once,’ said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, ‘I was a real Turtle.’

These words were followed by a very long silence, broken only by an occasional exclamation of ‘Hjckrrh!’ from the Gryphon, and the constant heavy sobbing of the Mock Turtle. Alice was very nearly getting up and saying, ‘Thank you, sir, for your interesting story,’ but she could not help thinking there MUST be more to come, so she sat still and said nothing.

‘When we were little,’ the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, ‘we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle—we used to call him Tortoise—’

Comments

  • Cristi G.

    “Burn the Henrietta!” “Yes; at least the upper part of her. The coal has given out.” “Burn my vessel!” cried Captain Speedy, who could scarcely pronounce the words. “A vessel worth fifty thousand dollars!”

  • Cristi G.

    “Here are sixty thousand,” replied Phileas Fogg, handing the captain a roll of bank-bills. This had a prodigious effect on Andrew Speedy. An American can scarcely remain unmoved at the sight of sixty thousand dollars.

  • Cristi G.

    The bomb would not go off after all. Mr. Fogg had taken away the match. “And I shall still have the iron hull,” said the captain in a softer tone. “The iron hull and the engine. Is it agreed?” “Agreed.”

    • Cristi G.

      And Andrew Speedy, seizing the banknotes, counted them and consigned them to his pocket. During this colloquy, Passepartout was as white as a sheet, and Fix seemed on the point of having an apoplectic fit. Nearly twenty thousand pounds had been expended, and Fogg left the hull and engine to the captain, that is, near the whole value of the craft!

      • Cristi G.

        s, unless I arrive in London by a quarter before nine on the evening of the 21st of December.

  • Cristi G.

    And, having paid his passenger what he considered a high compliment, he was going away, when Mr. Fogg said, “The vessel now belongs to me?” “Certainly, from the keel to the truck of the masts—all the wood, that is.

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