Sentence No. 119 · 24 July 2026
The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting “Off with his head!” or “Off with her head!” about once in a minute.
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
Notice the semicolon: it splits the sentence into two parallel halves, each describing the chaos with a chain of 'and' clauses. The fragment after the semicolon must begin with 'and in a very short time', signalling a new subject shift to the Queen.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 8 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. A child finds herself describing a chaotic and impossible garden game. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
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