These idle thoughts only made Alice realize how dreadfully bored she was. Great Aunt Ermintrude had three daughters of her own (triplets in fact) but they were all much older than Alice (and Alice always had trouble telling them apart), so they weren't much fun at all! There was nothing to do in Manchester. The only sounds she could hear were the pitter-pattering of the rain against the window and the tick-tocking, tick-tocking of the grandfather clock in the corner of the room. The housemaid had dusted the clock this very morning and the door of it was still open. Alice could see the brass pendulum swinging back and forth, back and forth. It made her feel quite, quite sleepy, but at the same time quite, quite restless. It was at this very moment that she noticed a solitary white ant marching across the breakfast table towards a sticky dollop of Ecklethorpe's Radish Jam; the maid had neglected to remove this in her cleaning. Alice had tried a spoonful of the radish jam (it was Uncle Mortimer's favourite preserve) on a piece of toast that very morning but had found the taste of it too sickly sour. The ant was now running over the jigsaw puzzle that Alice had spent the whole morning trying to complete, only to find (frustratingly) that fully twelve pieces were missing from the segmented picture of London Zoo. "Oh, Mister Ant," Alice said aloud (although how she could possibly tell it was a Mister from that distance is quite beyond understanding), "how is it that you've got so much to do, whilst I, a very grown-up young girl, have got so very little to do?"

The white ant, of course, did not bother to make an answer.

Instead it was Whippoorwill who spoke to Alice. "Who is it that smiles at ten to two," he squawked, "and frowns at twenty past seven, every single day?" Whippoorwill was a green-and-yellow-plumed parrot with a bright orange beak who lived in a brass cage. He was a very talkative parrot and this pleased Alice - at least she had somebody to converse with. The trouble was, Whippoorwill could only speak in riddles.