But Alice was a careful girl. ‘It can be dangerous to drink out of strange bottles,’ she said. ‘What will it do to me?’ She drank a little bit very slowly. The taste was very nice, like chocolate and oranges and hot sweet coffee, and very soon Alice finished the bottle.
‘What a storage feeling!’ said Alice. ‘I think I’m getting smaller and smaller every second.’
And she was. A few minutes later she was only twenty-five centimetres high. ‘And now,’ she said happily, ‘I can get through the little door into that beautiful garden.’
She ran once to the door. When she got there, she remembered that the little gold key was back on the glass table. She ran back to the table for it, but of course, she was now much too small! There was the key, high above her, on top of the table. She tried very hard to climb up the table leg, but she could not do it.
At last, tired and unhappy, Alice sat down on the floor and cried. But after a while she spoke to herself angrily.