Page:Carroll - Sylvie and Bruno.djvu/93

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A BEGGAR'S PALACE.
65

mouse into an elephant, you would develop an elephant into a mouse !" But here we plunged into a tunnel, and I leaned back and closed my eyes for a moment, trying to recall a few of the incidents of my recent dream.

"I thought I saw——" I murmured sleepily : and then the phrase insisted on conjugating itself, and ran into "you thought you saw——he thought he saw——" and then it suddenly went off into a song :——


       "He thought he saw an Elephant,
           That practised on a fife :
      He looked again, and found it was
           A letter from his wife.
      ’At length I realise! he said,
           ’The bitterness of Life !’"


And what a wild being it was who sang these wild words ! A Gardener he seemed to be——yet surely a mad one, by the way he brandished his rake——madder, by the way he broke, ever and anon, into a frantic jig——maddest of all, by the shriek in which he brought out the last words of the stanza !

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