if it wasn’t trouble enough hatching the eggs,’ said the Pigeon; ‘but I must be on the look-out for serpents night and day! Why, I haven’t had a wink of sleep these three weeks!’ ‘I’m very sorry you’ve been annoyed,’ said Alice, who was beginning to see its meaning. ‘And just as I’d taken the highest tree in the wood,’ continued the Pigeon, raising its voice to a shriek, ‘and just as I was thinking I should be free of them at last, they must needs come wriggling down from the sky! Ugh, Serpent!’ ‘But I’m NOT a serpent, I tell you!’ said Alice. ‘I’m a--I’m a--’ ‘Well! WHAT are you?’ said the Pigeon. ‘I can see you’re trying to invent something!’ ‘I--I’m a little girl,’ said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day. ‘A likely story indeed!’ said the Pigeon in a tone of the deepest contempt. ‘I’ve seen a good many little girls in my time, but never ONE with such a neck as that! No, no! You’re a serpent; and there’s no use denying it. I suppose you’ll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!’ ‘I HAVE tasted eggs, certainly,’ said Alice, who was a very truthful child; ‘but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.’ ‘I don’t believe it,’ said the Pigeon; ‘but if they do, why then they’re a kind of serpent, that’s all I can say.’ This was such a new idea to Alice, that she was quite silent for a minute or two, which gave the Pigeon the opportunity of adding, ‘You’re looking for eggs, I know THAT well enough; and what does it matter to me whether you’re a little girl or a serpent?’ ‘It matters a good deal to ME,’ said Alice hastily; ‘but I’m not looking for eggs, as it happens; and if I was, I shouldn’t want YOURS: I don’t like them raw.’ ‘Well, be off, then!’ said the Pigeon in a sulky tone, as it settled down again into its nest. Alice crouched down among the trees as well as she could, for her neck kept getting entangled among the branches, and every now and then she had to sto