Painting #8: All Animals Are Equal
BORDER PHRASE: “End to end to end all animals are equal in a tale of tail to tail.”
BARBED LETTER WORD: LOST
RED LETTER WORD: SMILE
WORD FROM THE MASTER RIDDLE: AMULET
HIDDEN HARE: Turnin’ like a wheel.
CLUES & COMMENTS: Through the magic of anagrams, the red letter word could be MILES (as in what Jack must travel), but it’s actually supposed to be SMILE (as in what the sun is doing). This page wound up having significance in Kit’s second, untitled book.
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If you turn the picture upside down and look at the sun that way, it wears quite a different expression, certainly needing some encouragement to SMILE.
Indeed: it seems as though the sun is happiest during the day, but when the picture is rotated and night falls, his services are no longer required and so his expression droops somewhat.
Do you know the answer to the riddle, “A hopper of ditches…” It was one of the only ones I couldn’t solve.
A hare! I’m not familiar with the original riddle, but that’s the answer that comes to mind. And I just found some confirmation in the fourth riddle from this 1941 Irish riddle book:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20642554
Perhaps KW was inspired by it!
Where is the rat in the picture?
I think it’s a cross of ram and cat
The red letters can be rearranged to spell SMILE, MILES — or LIMES. A tree in the lower right corner appears to have small whitish flowers all over it — lime blossoms, perhaps? For a time I thought this page hinted that the treasure was buried under a lime tree! So many red herrings…