On the floor were heaps of sticks and dry twigs; her dress was quite covered in dust and prickles, so that she felt a little like a hedgehog. She brushed them off with her hands.

'I wonder if there are mice in here?' she thought. 'Poor Dinah! How she would have enjoyed this!'

Here and there, there were cupboards on the wall of the rabbit-hole. 'Perhaps', thought Alice, 'I could climb the shelves as though they were a ladder'. Pulling open a cupboard door, she made her first attempt to do so. But the cupboard was full of books, too full to admit her feet.

'Maybe I could pull the books out?' she wondered to herself. But there were so many! She calculated that there were quite enough books in the first cupboard alone to cover the floor of the room in which she stood - if she emptied only twenty cupboards, she would have filled the room entirely. 'And if by some mischance I fell -' she thought, 'I would break the spines of the books'. For Alice had been brought up to have respect for books, despite her disdain of her sister's choice of reading matter, and she felt that using them as a crash mattress was really a little too much.

She sighed; it seemed she had no choice but to follow the White Rabbit after all.