find a great pot of red clay, full of gold and
precious jewels.'
Albert-next-door only sniggered and said, 'What silly nonsense!' He
cannot play properly at all. It is very strange, because he has a very
nice uncle. You see, Albert-next-door doesn't care for reading, and he
has not read nearly so many books as we have, so he is very foolish and
ignorant, but it cannot be helped, and you just have to put up with it
when you want him to do anything. Besides, it is wrong to be angry with
people for not being so clever as you are yourself. It is not always
their faults.
So Oswald said, 'Come and dig! Then you shall share the treasure when
we've found it.'
But he said, 'I shan't--I don't like digging--and I'm just going in to
my tea.'
'Come along and dig, there's a good boy,' Alice said. 'You can use my
spade. It's much the best--'
So he came along and dug, and when once he was over the wall we kept him
at it, and we worked as well, of course, and the hole got deep. Pincher
worked too--he is our dog and he is very good at digging. He digs for
rats in the dustbin sometimes, and gets very dirty. But we love our dog,
even when his face wants washing.
'I expect we shall have to make a tunnel,' Oswald said, 'to reach the
rich treasure.' So he jumped into the hole and began to dig at one side.
After that we took it in turns to dig at the tunnel, and Pincher was
most useful in scraping the earth out of the tunnel--he does it with
his back feet when you say 'Rats!' and he digs with his front ones, and
burrows with his nose as well.
At last the tunnel was nearly a yard long, and big enough to creep
along to find the treasure, if only it had been a bit longer. Now it was
Albert's turn to go in and dig, but he funked it.
'Take your turn like a man,' said Oswald--nobody can say that Oswald
doesn't take his turn like a man. But Albert wouldn't. So we had to make
him, because it was only fair.
'It's quite easy,' Alice said. 'You just crawl in and dig with your
hands. Then when you come out we can scrape out what you've done, with
the spades. Come--be a man. You won't notice it being dark in the tunnel
if you shut your eyes tight. We've all been in except Dora--and she
doesn't like worms.'
'I don't like worms neither.' Albert-next-door said this; but we
remembered how he had picked a fat red and black worm up in his fingers
and thrown it at Dora only the day before. So we put him in.
But he would not go in head f
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