"We are the tripletted daughters of Ermintrude..." they answered all of a piece.

"My name is Dorothy..." the first woman said.

"My name also is Dorothy..." the second added.

"My name also and also is Dorothy..." completed the third.

"So you're the answer to my two o'clock writing lesson!" said Alice. "You three are the Dot and the Dot and the Dot of an ellipsis!"

"That is correct..." answered the three Dots all together. "We are the Ellipsisters... and you must be Alice..." But they were talking to Celia!

"I'm Alice!" corrected Alice. "That is Celia."

"We didn't realize you had a twin sister, Alice..." the three women said.

"And I didn't realize that you three Dorothys would still be here," replied Alice. "Why have you let this house get into such a state?"

"Time slowed to a standstill for us since you vanished, Alice... We never married, you know..."

"Three minutes to two, Alice," whispered the clock, and then there was a sudden, furious banging on the front door!

"Oh no!" screamed Alice. "It's Mrs Minus trying to get in!" added Celia.

It was all too much for Alice. "I'll never find the final jigsaw piece now!" she snuffled.

"But dear Alice," the three Dorothys tripletted in tandem, "you are the final jigsaw piece..."

"But that's impossible!" Alice sobbed. "I'm a girl, not a piece in a puzzle!"

"I think they might be right, Alice," said Celia.

Alice ran to the breakfast table. There was the dusty old jigsaw picture with its little crooked hole where the last piece was missing. Alice saw that the hole wasn't actually inside one of the various animal cages; it was actually a hole in the pathways between the cages; the pathways where the visitors could wander. In fact the hole was missing from a young girl's head! And the girl had on a red pinafore! "Well I suppose that might be me," said Alice, "but I would never fit in such a tiny opening! Especially with Celia!"

"I'm not coming with you, Alice," said Celia.

"Of course you're coming with me!" said Alice.

"I'm afraid I didn't eat the radishes, Alice. But the truth is... I rather like living in the future." Celia stuck Whippoorwill's lost feather in her hair, as she said this. "The future is my proper home."

"Celia!" cried Alice, as the clock whispered, "Two minutes to two, Alice!"

"Alice!" shouted Mrs Minus as she whipped her scaly tail at the front door of the house. Everything was happening all at once!

Celia suddenly said to Alice, "Shall we open the cupboard in my left-hand-side thigh?"

"The one TO BE OPENED IN AN EXTREME EMERGENCY ONLY?"

"That's the one, Alice."

So Alice opened up the tiny door in Celia's thigh: inside, she found only a small lead ball labelled with the words SHOOT ME. "Shoot me from what?" asked Alice. At which question, Celia unbuttoned her pinafore.

"One minute to two, Alice!" tick-tocked the clock, gaining a frightful pace!

The front door was being smashed down into firewood! "Mrs Minus has broken through!" cried Alice.

"Stay calm, my sister. Open me up, please." Celia had revealed her bare, porcelain stomach, in the middle of which nestled another small door. Alice opened this cupboard; a flintlock pistol was lodged within Celia's inner workings. FIRE ME said its label.

"I can't use that," said Alice.

"Pablo Ogden has built this gun into my body for a purpose," answered Celia. "Hand me the shot."

Alice gave the lead ball to Celia. Just then, Mrs Minus burst into the breakfast room! She had by now turned more or less fully into a giant snake! Only a single human hand extended from her reptilian body, and within its grip rested her own pistol. Mrs Minus aimed the pistol directly at Alice's heart. "You will pay for your treachery, my young girl!" she hissed, whilst beginning to squeeze on the trigger.

Time became stilled for a single second.

And then, how the Snakewoman screamed! Alice saw that a certain invisible but sharply clawed cat had pounced upon Mrs Minus.

"My sweet Quark!" Alice whispered. "You have come to save me!" But Mrs Minus threw off the invisible cat, and raised her gun once again.

"It's two o'clock, Alice!" whispered the grandfather clock. "Time to go home!" And then it donged a first ding!

And by that first ding, Celia had managed to load her own pistol.

Mrs Minus squeezed her trigger, but --

Celia squeezed hers first!

Mrs Minus was splatter-snaked all over the walls!

Alice climbed onto the dining table, and jumped down into the remaining jigsaw hole...

And in the time it takes to turn over the page of a book...

"What Time Do You Call This, Alice?"

... the clock dinged its second dong, and Alice landed with a soft flump! into her armchair, and then she awoke with a sudden start.

"Oh what a curious dream!" Alice said to herself. "Why, it was almost real!" She rubbed at her eyes and then looked at the grandfather clock in the corner; it was more or less, exactly two o'clock. "I must have fallen asleep in the armchair!" Alice got up and moved to the window; the rain was lashing against the glass and the lightning was flashing over the gravestones in the cemetery.

"Squawk, squawk!" screeched Whippoorwill from his cage.

Suddenly, the dining-room door was flung open. "What time do you call this, Alice?" bellowed Great Aunt Ermintrude from the doorway.

"I call it the past time," answered Alice (without really knowing why).

"A pastime!" screamed her Great Aunt. "Do you really think that life is a game, Alice? Well, let me tell you: life is a lesson to be hard-earned! I don't suppose you've finished your latest lesson, about the correct usage of an ellipsis?"

"An ellipsis, Great Aunt Ermintrude," began Alice quite confidently, "is a series of three dots at the end of an unfinished sentence, which implies a certain omittance of words, a certain lingering doubt..."

"Very good, Alice!" responded Great Aunt Ermintrude (with surprise). "But I'm afraid there's no such word as omittance. There's an admittance, or else there's an omission, but there's no such word between the two! We have a great deal of work yet to do on your grammar!" Ermintrude then walked over to the breakfast table. "I see that you've finished your jigsaw of London Zoo. So you managed to find the missing pieces...?"

"Yes, I managed it," answered Alice, quietly. "Oh my goodness! There's a hideous white ant crawling over the jigsaw..."

"It's not an ant, Great Aunt," Alice tried to say, "it's a termite."

"I don't care if it's a prize peacock! I won't allow such vermin in my house!" And before Alice could do anything at all, her Great Aunt had cruelly squashed the creature under her fingers! "And where is the new doll that I bought you?" her Great Aunt then asked.

"She is lost, Great Aunt."

"You mean to say that you don't know where the doll is?"

"Oh, I know where she is, Great Aunt."

"May I suggest then, Alice, that you retrieve her?"

"Oh I will, Great Aunt," said Alice in a mutter, "one of these days..."

"Stop muttering, you naughty little girl!" screeched Ermintrude. "It's very rude! Now it's time for today's writing lesson. Pencils out! Books open! Today we shall learn all about the differences between the past and the present tenses."

"I know all about those differences!" Alice said (strictly to herself, of course!).

And thus began the next lesson, and the next one after that, and then the next one after that: all the lessons of life that Alice had to learn, both in Manchester and then in the south of England upon her return, and then throughout the rest of her long life. Alice came to realize that the whole of life could be one long continuous hard lesson. (If you weren't careful, that is!) But Alice had also come to realize that life could be a continuous dream, and as Alice got older and older and older, she never forgot to let a little soft dream into her hard lessons. During the more miserable of her moods, she would find herself revisiting the memories of her three journeys into dreamland: the wonder of life, the mirror of life, the future of life.