Chapter XII
Sneezing
In which Alice finds her way home
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The King was the first to sneeze.
It wasn’t, as Alice observed, a particularly big sneeze but it was, as it turned out, a very important one.
The King had just finished making a rather lengthy speech in praise of Alice, and he was just about to hand the cake knife to her.
He had already caught himself just in time on two previous occasions, but this time the sneeze had come from nowhere.
In the excitement, the King had dropped the cake knife.
The knife had bounced as knives usually don’t, and had come to rest under the tea trolley.
The Queen had chided the King for his carelessness, and the King had complained that it wasn’t his fault.
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The Queen was the next to sneeze.
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Her sneeze had been so sudden that she had dropped the plate that she was holding, and the plate had shattered as it hit the floor.
‘That is definitely the pepper,’ thought Alice.
She remembered, not so long ago, when she had been playing with her sisters, chasing them around the room and calling them names.
One of them had bumped into the dresser where the pepper was sitting, and the container had dropped to the floor, spilling open as it went.
In an instant, they had all been sneezing so violently that they had quite forgotten their quarrels.
‘Pepper is definitely a wonderful thing,’ thought Alice. ‘Why, if we could send pepper to all the places in the world where people are fighting, then we could make them forget their differences in no time at all!’
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Alice was so pleased with this discovery that she made herself promise that she would tell everyone about it, if she ever got home again.
In the meantime, the sneezing had become so severe that both the King and the Queen had been reduced to fits.
The noise had attracted the attention of the courtiers outside, and gradually they made their way back into the room, to see what was going on.
As more and more of them made their way into the room, the ones at the back had pressed the ones at the front further forward until the crowd was hard up against the royal couple.
Then, the sneezing spread from the King and Queen to the nearest courtiers, and then to those further away, until the whole room was sneezing in sympathy with each other.
In the confusion, Alice took the opportunity to drop to her knees, and to crawl under the tea trolley in search of the cake knife.
It would certainly be so much quieter under the tea trolley, she thought.
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And, as she reasoned, the chances of her sneezing as well were so much less with the tablecloth draped all around her.
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She wasn’t the only one with that thought, for under the tea trolley Alice found the kitten washing her face with both paws.
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‘Purely precautionary,’ purred the kitten, on seeing Alice.
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‘Pepper is a terrible thing. Gets everywhere!’ ...
