Context: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a lecturer of mathematics at Oxford University, is remembered chiefly by his pen-name, Lewis Carroll, the author of imaginative children's stories in which his young friend, Alice Lid-dell, has the key role. In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice, bored with sitting beside her sister who is reading, follows a White Rabbit and falls a great distance down the rabbit hole. At the end of the fall, Alice, discovering herself in a queer land, has many strange adventures; for instance, she attends a tea with the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and a sleepy Dormouse, and finds the conversation disjointed and peculiar. The Hatter, asking what day it is, looks at his watch; and when Alice says it is the fourth, the ensuing conversation is typically nonsensical: