"Oh, how wonderful!" the Queen said; "and it all belongs to me—at least, so they say—though I can’t quite see what good it does me, for I can’t be everywhere at once. And I can’t even make the hills move or the sea heave its breast; so that I can’t see that it does me any more good than any one else, because it isn’t even constitutional for me to be here. I ought to be down there in the palace garden, seeing nothing at all. However, it’s very lovely here, so I mustn’t grumble. I wonder how the bat is getting on, and the Regent, and all." So for a while she stayed, looking down at the town. Into the streets she could not see, for the houses stood in the way, but she could see the market-place plainly enough and the palace steps. Presently a number of soldiers came running into the market-place, and up into the palace, and the Queen knew they had come to announce her flight. And then, a few minutes after, she saw then coming rapidly out of the doors. "Goodness me!" the Queen said, "the Regent is kicking them down the steps. I shan’t go back there again, or he might take to kicking me." So she set out along the hilltops, sometimes walking and sometimes flying over the valleys, so that, by the time the sun was near setting, she found herself in a great stretch of dreary uplands, with nothing like a house for miles around. "Now, whatever shall I do?" she said. "It’s coming on quite dark, and I don’t know where I am. I’ve a good mind to lie down and go to sleep on the heather; only there might be some sort of wild animals about, and it wouldn’t be safe." Then the sun sank lower and lower, and the Queen began to feel a little lonely and very nervous. There was not a sound to be heard, save the roar of a brook that ran, gleaming white, among the boulders in the gloom of the valley at her feet. "If I fly right up in the air again I shall be safe, at any rate," the Queen said. "I shan’t go tumbling over precipices or getting eaten up by wolves." So she flew right up into the upper air where she could see the sun again, and she tried to catch him up, flying fast, fast westwards. But she found that the sun went a great deal faster than she could go—for, you know, the sun goes a great deal more quickly than a train—and gradually he sank below the horizon, and the Queen was left alone with nothing but the stars to keep her company. As you may imagine, it was not the pleasantest of feelings, that flying through the pitch-dark night, and the Queen felt continually afraid of running against something, though she was really far too high to do any such thing.