could I help it?"
They stood a moment in silence, and then George, a little embarrassed for he'd never done this before, asked her blessing; and she gave it gladly, on his flocks and on his produce, and on his old head; she bent and kissed him where he knelt, and went on.
So Big
The glades like pools, one after another, continued a long way. This part, Alice thought, was the best so far: these violets and these new moist ferns, those graylichened stones, these bars of benevolent sun. "So big," she said. "So big." A thousand creatures paused in their spring occupations to watch her pass; the hum of newborn insects was like a constant breath. "Dad would have liked this place," she thought, and even as she thought it she knew how it was that he had come (or would come) to understand the voices of creatures, for she understood them herself, she needed only to listen.
Mute rabbits and noisy jays, gross belching frogs and chipmunks who made smart remarks—but what was that in the further glade, standing on one leg, lifting alternately one wing and then the other? A stork, wasn't it?
"Don't I know you?" Alice asked when she had entered there. The stork leapt away, startled and looking guilty and confused.
"Well, I'm not sure," the stork said. It looked at Alice first with one eye, and then with both eyes down its long red beak, which gave it a look at once worried and censorious, as though it peered over the tops of pince-nez spectacles. "I'm not sure at all. I'm not sure of much at all, to tell you the truth."
"I think I do," Alice said. "Didn't you once raise a family at Edgewood, on the roof?"
"I may have," the stork said. It made to preen its feathers with its beak, and did it very clumsily, as though surprised to find it had feathers at all. "This," Alice heard it say to itself, "is going to be just an enormous trial, I can see that."
Alice helped her loose a primary that had got folded the wrong way, and the stork, after some uncomfortable fluffing, said, "I wonder—I wonder if you would mind my walking a ways with you?"
"Of course you may," Alice said. "If you're sure you wouldn't rather fly."
"Fly?" said the stork, alarmed. "Fly?"
"Well," Alice said, "I'm not really sure where I'm going at all. I sort of just got here."
"No matter," the stork said. "I just got here myself, in a manner of speaking."
They walked on together, the stork as storks do taking long, careful steps as though afraid to find something unpleasant underfoot.
"How," Alice asked, since the stork said nothing more, "did you just get here?"
"Well," the stork said.
"I'll tell you my story," Alice said, "if you'll tell me yours." For the stork seemed to want to speak, but to be unable to bring itself to do it.
"It depends," the stork said at last, "on whose story it is you want to hear. Oh, very well. No more equivocation.
"Once," it said, after a further pause, "I was a real stork. Or rather, a real stork was all I was, or she was. I'm telling this very badly, but at all events I was also, or we were also, a young woman: a very proud and very ambitious young woman, who had just learned, in another country, some very difficult tricks from masters far older and wiser than herself. There was no need, no need at all, for her to practice one of these tricks on an unwitting bird, but she was young and somewhat thoughtless, and the opportunity presented itself.
"She performed her trick or manipulation very well, and was thrilled at her new powers, though how the stork bore it—well, I'm afraid she, I, never gave much thought to that, or rather I, the stork, I thought about nothing else.
"I had been given consciousness, you see. I didn't know that it was not my own but another's, and only loaned to me, or rather given or hidden in me for safe-keeping. I, I the stork, thought—well, it's very distressing to think of, but I thought that I was not a stork at all; I believed myself to be a human woman, who by the malice of someone, I didn't know whom, had been transformed into a stork, or imprisoned in one. I had no memory of the human woman I had been, because of course she retained that life and its memories, and went