Through the Looking Glass

I'm taking the dope metaphor one step further. To Through the Looking Glass.

Is this reminiscent of something you read a long time ago:

p. 108
. . . Over the water a kingfisher shot, laughing, iridescent in the sun, just above the evening which had already obscured the stream. I'm not mad, August thought.

p. 109
. . . August, fish in his creel, went to the bank and sat, waiting. The kingfisher had laughed at him, not at the world in general, he was sure of that, a sarcastic, vindictive laugh. Well, perhaps he was laughable. The fish was not seven inches long, hardly breakfast. So? Well? "If I had to live on fish," he said, "I'd grow a beak."

You shouldn't speak," said the kingfisher, "until you're spoken to. There are manners, you know."

"Sorry."

"First I speak," said the kingfisher, "and you wonder who it is that's spoken to you. Then you realize it's me; then you look at your thumb and your fish, and see that it was the fish's blood you tasted, that allowed you to understand the voice of creatures, then we converse."

"I didn't mean . . ."

"We'll assume it was done that way." The kingfisher spoke in the choleric, impateient tone August would have expected from his upshot head-feathers, his thick neck, his fierce, annoyed eyes and beak: a kingfisher's voice. Halcyon bird indeed!

"Now you address me," the kingfisher said. "'O Bird!' you say, and make your request."

"O Bird!" August said, opening his hands imploringly, "Tell me this: Is it okay if we have a gas station in Meadowbrook and sell Ford cars?"

"Certainly."

"What?"

"Certainly!"

It was so inconvenient speaking in this way to a bird, a kingfisher seated on a branch in a dead tree at no more conversational a distance than any kingfisher ever was, that August imagined the bird as seated beside him on the bank, a sort of kingfisher-like person, of a more conversable size, with his legs crossed, as August's were. This worked well. He doubted that this kingfisher was a kingfisher at all anyway."

And so on. I'm don't want to type any more. But I suggest you revisit where I left off on p. 110.

Ed