In Chapter 5, Alice notices beautiful scented rushes (water plants) from the boat she is in with the Sheep. Carroll uses imagery and a simile to help the reader see the fast-fading rushes as a symbol for the process of growing up:
What mattered it to her just then that the rushes had begun to fade, and to lose all their scent and beauty, from the very moment that she picked them? Even real scented rushes, you know, last only a very little while—and these, being dream-rushes, melted away almost like snow, as they lay in heaps at her feet—but Alice hardly noticed this, there were so many other curious things to think about.
Just as Alice picks the plants that the boat passes, they fade. Alice understands that real rushes would fade away, too, over time, but "these, being dream-rushes, melted away almost like snow, as they lay in heaps at her feet." Carroll fleshes out the image of rushes fading away at Alice's feet by comparing them to melting snow. Like snow, the dream-rushes start melting as soon as Alice's warm hand touches them. The ephemeral rushes, which Alice keeps reaching for as the boat passes by them, represent the way childhood experiences transform quickly from milestones ahead to mere memories in our past.
The simile helps Carroll use the rushes to say something more specific about Alice's childhood, as well. In Chapter 1, Alice stared out the window and imagined the snow tucking in the trees and fields for the winter like a loving parent preparing their child to wake up feeling loved. By comparing the rushes to melting snow, Carroll recalls Alice's earlier personification of snow. In that scene, Alice's wishful personification of snow faded in her mind as soon as it came alive, giving way to the reality that snow is just snow and that Alice herself is a lonely child without many loving adults in her life. The way the rushes melt "almost like snow" when Alice touches them suggests that not only childhood milestones but also the idealized version of a happy childhood evade Alice's real grasp.
In Chapter 8, Alice watches the Red Knight and White Knight fight each other. She uses two similes to make sense of what she is witnessing:
["]What a noise they make when they tumble! Just like a whole set of fire-irons falling into the fender! And how quiet the horses are! They let them get on and off them just as if they were tables!”
Alice compares the noise the Knights make falling over to the sound of "a whole set of fire-irons falling into the fender," and she compares the horses to inanimate tables because they are patiently letting the Knights climb on them over and over again only to fall back off. Alice's choice of similes gives the reader a glimpse of what her life is like when she is awake. The "fender" she describes is a metal bar that wraps around a fireplace to keep the logs from rolling out (and sometimes to keep children from climbing into the fireplace). The fact that Alice knows just what it sounds like when a set of fire-irons falls and clangs into the fender suggests that she might sometimes cause an accidental ruckus while playing near the fireplace. Her comparison of the horses to tables suggests that Alice thinks of tables as something that can be climbed. Together, the similes form a picture of an imaginative and possibly lonely child who spends a lot of time entertaining herself and who sometimes gets into trouble.
