Alice said: "I wish we were in a book. People in books never dig without finding something. I think I'd rather it was a secret passage than anything."
Oswald stopped to wipe his honest brow ere replying.
"A secret's nothing when you've found it out. Look at the secret staircase. It's no good, not even for hide-and-seek, because of its squeaking. I'd rather have the pot of gold we used to dig for when we were little." It was really only last year, but you seem to grow old very quickly after you have once passed the prime of your youth, which is at ten, I believe.
"How would you like to find the mouldering bones of Royalist soldiers foully done to death by nasty Ironsides?" Noël asked, with his mouth full of plum.
"If they were really dead it wouldn't matter," Dora said. "What I'm afraid of is a skeleton that can walk about and catch at your legs when you're going up-stairs to bed."
"Skeletons can't walk," Alice said in a hurry; "you know they can't, Dora."
And she glared at Dora till she made her sorry she had said what she had. The things you are frightened of, or even those you would rather not meet in the dark, should never be mentioned before the little ones, or else they cry when it comes to bedtime, and say it was because of what you said.
"We sha'n't find anything. No jolly fear," said Dicky.
And just then my spade I was digging with struck on something hard, and it felt hollow. I did really think for one joyful space that we had found that pot of gold. But the thing, whatever it was, seemed to be longish; longer, that is, than a pot of gold would naturally be. And as I uncovered it I saw that it was not at all pot-of-gold-color, but like a bone Pincher has buried. So Oswald said:
"It is the skeleton."