“The Duke and Duchess!” said the White Rabbit nervously, as it went scurrying past; “they may be here at any moment, and I haven’t got it yet.”

“Hasn’t got what?” wondered Alice.

“A rhyme for Cornwall,” said the Rabbit, as if in answer to her thought; “borne well, yawn well”—and he pattered away into the distance, dropping in his hurry a folded paper that he had been carrying.

“What have you got there?” asked the Cheshire Cat as Alice picked up the paper and opened it.

“It seems to be a kind of poetry,” said Alice doubtfully; “at least,” she added, “some of the words rhyme and none of them appear to have any particular meaning.”

“What is it about?” asked the Cat.

“Well, some one seems to be coming somewhere from everywhere else, and to get a mixed reception:
... Your Father smiles,
Your Mother weeps.”
{48}

“I’ve heard something like that before,” said the Cat; “it went on, if I remember, ‘Your aunt has the pen of the gardener.’”


THE WHITE RABBIT.

“There’s nothing about that here,” said Alice; “supposing she didn’t weep when the time came?”

“She would if she had to read all that stuff,” said the Cat.{49}

“And then it goes on—
You went as came the swallow.”

“That doesn’t help us unless we know how the swallow came,” observed the Cat. “If he went as the swallow usually travels he would have won the Deutsch Prize.”
“ ...homeward draw
Now it hath winged its way to winters green.”

“There seems to have been some urgent reason for avoiding the swallow,” continued Alice. “Then all sorts of things happened to the Almanac:
Twice a hundred dawns, a ............