Nohow! Tweedledum cried out briskly, and shut his mouth up again with
a snap.
Next Boy! said Alice, passing on to Tweedledee, though she felt quite
certain he would only shout out Contrariwise! and so he did.
You ve been wrong! cried Tweedledum. The first thing in a visit is
to say How d ye do? and shake hands! And here the two brothers gave
each other a hug, and then they held out the two hands that were free,
to shake hands with her.
Alice did not like shaking hands with either of them first, for fear of
hurting the other one s feelings; so, as the best way out of the
difficulty, she took hold of both hands at once: the next moment they
were dancing round in a ring. This seemed quite natural (she remembered
afterwards), and she was not even surprised to hear music playing: it
seemed to come from the tree under which they were dancing, and it was
done (as well as she could make it out) by the branches rubbing one
across the other, like fiddles and fiddle-sticks.
But it certainly _was_ funny, (Alice said afterwards, when she was
telling her sister the history of all this,) to find myself singing
_Here we go round the mulberry bush_. I don t know when I began it,
but somehow I felt as if I d been singing it a long long time!
The other two dancers were fat, and very soon out of breath. Four
times round is enough for one dance, Tweedledum panted out, and they
left off dancing as suddenly as they had begun: the music stopped at
the same moment.
Then they let go of Alice s hands, and stood looking at her for a
minute: there was a rather awkward pause, as Alice didn t know how to
begin a conversation with people she had just been dancing with. It
would never do to say How d ye do? _now_, she said to herself: we
seem to have got beyond that, somehow!
I hope you re not much tired? she said at last.
Nohow. And thank you _very_ much for asking, said Tweedledum.
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