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Fiction is delicious, I discovered one day. I was about eight, sitting under the sycamore tree in the back yard and reading my mother's childhood copy of "Through the Looking Glass," while idly tearing off and eating the page corners. This old volume is before me now, and it is still full of pleasurable memories, visual, tactile, and even tasty.

The book includes both the Alice stories, with "Alice in Wonderland first." The cover, loved to pieces, shows a full-color Alice plumper than Tenniel's familiar version; she is floating down the rabbit hole in a pose of peaceful surrender, one hand on her breast, something like Saint Teresa in Ecstasy. Inside, the book is inscribed in black ink, "To Barbara from 'Inkle Ferber,' Christmas 1930." I have no idea who these people are. (Perhaps my mother stole the volume from another little girl.) The pages are cream-colored, aging to brown at the edges; they are thick and invitingly chewy. The oversized print is charcoal-gray.

I read "Alice in Wonderland," more than once, but it was "Through the Looking Glass" that I loved best: that was the story that led me to carry the battered volume to high school, to college, off into marriage, even to the hospital to read between contractions. In this second adventure, Alice goes through the drawing-room mirror, which melts like mist to her touch. In the Garden of the Live Flowers, the Red Queen shows Alice the countryside laid out in squares like a chessboard, and invites her to take the place of the White Queen's pawn. As Alice progresses from square to square, she meets characters like Tweedledum and Tweedledee (who recite "The Walrus and the Carpenter"); Humpty Dumpty ("When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean"); and the lost, gentle White Knight with his absurd inventions.

It is a delightful work, and some passages still make me laugh out loud. Yet overall, the story bears a scent of a melancholy. In comparison, "Alice in Wonderland" is shallow and contrived, a series of jokes. "Through the Looking Glass" moves at a more shadowy depth, as if sounding up from the bottom of a lake. At some points it is disturbing, even threatening; surrealism unfolds like the petals of a dark rose.

For example, the sleeping Red King must not be disturbed because, as the Tweedles tell Alice, " 'You're only a sort of thing in his dream. … If that there King was to wake, you'd go out-bang!-just like a candle!' 'I am real!' said Alice and began to cry. … 'I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?' Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt."

In a dark shop, Alice encounters a hostile and abusive proprietress, a sheep knitting with 14 pairs of needles at once. (Many of the book's characters are rude and insulting.) The sheep offers to sell Alice two eggs for less than half the price of one: "Only you must eat them both, if you buy two." Alice declines this unsettling invitation.

The Bread-and-butter-fly lives on " 'Weak tea with cream in it,' the Gnat explained.

" 'Supposing it couldn't find any?' Alice asked.

" 'Then it would die, of course.'

" 'But that must happen very often.'

" 'It always happens,' said the Gnat. After this, Alice was silent for a minute or two, pondering."

There was nothing remotely like these seductively enigmatic passages in the sappy children's books I usually encountered. They created a taste, you might say, for more. Perhaps I nibbled the page corners hoping to ingest that mystery. Maybe I thought that, like a bottle marked "Drink Me," they would enable me to write with comparable power.

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July 17 1995, Vol. 39, No. 8