Page:Complete Works of Lewis Carroll.djvu/22

2 roving dream story and its sequel have seeped into the folk-lore of the world. It has become as deeply rooted a part of that folk lore as the legend of Cinderella or any other tale first told back in the unfathomable past. Not Tiny Tim, nor Falstaff, nor Rip Van Winkle, nor any other character wrought in the English tongue seems now a more permanent part of that tongue's heritage than do the high-handed Humpty Dumpty, the wistful Mad Hatter, the somewhat arbitrary Queen of Hearts, the evasive Cheshire Cat and the gently pathetic White Knight.

The tale has been read aloud in all the nurseries from Oxford town to the ends of the Empire. And there is no telling how many copies of it have been printed and sold. For when it was new, there was no binding law of international copyright and it was as much the prey of all the freebooters in America as was a somewhat kindred work of genius that came out of England a few years later—the nonsensical and lovely thing called Pinafore.

And the Alice books have known no frontier. If you poke about in the bookstalls on the Continent, you will stumble inevitably on Alice's Abenteur im Wunderland. Or Le Aventure d' Alice nel Paese Meraviglie (with illustrations, of course, by Giovanni Tenniel). You might even run into La aventuroj de Alicio en Mirlando which, if you must know, is life down a rabbit-hole as told in Esperanto. And you are certain to come upon Les Aventures d'Alice au Pays de Merveilles with one of the puns of the incorrigible Mock Turtle (Fausse-Tortue) rendered thus unrecognizable:

"La maitresse était une vieille tortue; nous l'appelions chélonée."

"Et pourquoi l'appeliez-vous chélonée, si ce n'était pas son nom?"

"Parcequ'on ne pouvait s'empêcher de s'écrier en la