'This promises to be a protracted if agreeable task,' said
Albert-next-door's uncle, rubbing his hands and looking at the hole with
Albert's head in it. 'I will get another spade,' so he fetched the big
spade out of the next-door garden tool-shed, and began to dig his nephew
out.

'Mind you keep very still,' he said, 'or I might chunk a bit out of you
with the spade.' Then after a while he said--

'I confess that I am not absolutely insensible to the dramatic interest
of the situation. My curiosity is excited. I own that I should like to
know how my nephew happened to be buried. But don't tell me if you'd
rather not. I suppose no force was used?'

'Only moral force,' said Alice. They used to talk a lot about moral
force at the High School where she went, and in case you don't know what
it means I'll tell you that it is making people do what they don't want
to, just by slanging them, or laughing at them, or promising them things
if they're good.

'Only moral force, eh?' said Albert-next-door's uncle. 'Well?'

'Well,' Dora said, 'I'm very sorry it happened to Albert--I'd rather it
had been one of us. It would have been my turn to go into the tunnel,
only I don't like worms, so they let me off. You see we were digging for
treasure.'

'Yes,' said Alice, 'and I think we were just coming to the underground
passage that leads to the secret hoard, when the tunnel fell in on
Albert. He _is_ so unlucky,' and she sighed.

Then Albert-next-door began to scream again, and his uncle wiped his
face--his own face, not Albert's--with his silk handkerchief, and then
he put it in his trousers pocket. It seems a strange place to put a
handkerchief, but he had his coat and waistcoat off and I suppose he
wanted the handkerchief handy. Digging is warm work.

He told Albert-next-door to drop it, or he wouldn't proceed further
in the matter, so Albert stopped screaming, and presently his uncle
finished digging him out. Albert did look so funny, with his hair all
dusty and his velvet suit covered with mould and his face muddy with
earth and crying.

We all said how sorry we were, but he wouldn't say a word back to us. He
was most awfully sick to think he'd been the one buried, when it might
just as well have been one of us. I felt myself that it was hard lines.

'So you were digging for treasure,' said Albert-next-door's uncle,
wiping his face again with his handkerchief. 'Well, I fear that your
chances of success are small. I hav