On its surface, the King’s instruction is a statement of the obvious: any reading begins at the beginning and ends at the end. The humor lies in dressing trivial common sense as courtroom procedure, as if the King were delivering a profound legal principle. In context, his command exposes the Wonderland court’s confusion of authority with clarity. Earlier, the King waffles between “important” and “unimportant,” and he fabricates “Rule Forty-two” to control Alice; now he pretends to manage evidence by prescribing the only possible way to read. The line is a compact parody of bureaucratic language that pretends to guide action while doing no intellectual work. It also primes the next gag: the verses, once read, prove nothing, yet the King still forces interpretations (“you can’t swim, can you?”; “that’s the jury, of course”) by wrenching lines into relevance. The instruction thus foreshadows the court’s method—apply procedure, then retrofit meaning—while Alice, growing larger and bolder, increasingly insists on sense over ceremony.