had fairly confronted himself with them. Then, in the ninth minute,
both legs began to fill up with pins and needles. This occupied his
attention. It was an axiom with him that under such painful conditions
one should at once get up and move around. Placed thus between two
directly conflicting duties, his conscience was torn. Then he
remembered his promise. His grit was good, and he determined to keep
his promise at all costs, no matter at what fatal consequence to his
legs. And he derived considerable comfort from the thought that, if
his leg should never be any use any more, his Uncle Andy would at least
be stricken with remorse.

Then, as the tenth minute dragged its enormous, trailing length along,
came that terrible feeling already alluded to--that he must either move
or burst. With poignant self-pity he argued the two desperate
alternatives within his soul. But, fortunately for him, before he felt
himself obliged to come to any final decision, something happened, and
his pain and doubts were forgotten.

Two big yellow-gray snowshoe rabbits came hopping lazily past, one just
ahead of the other. One jumped clean over Uncle Andy's out-stretched
feet, as if they were of no account or interest whatever to a rabbit.
The other stopped and thumped vigorously on the ground with his strong
hind foot. At this signal the first one also stopped. They both sat
up on their haunches, ears thrust forward in intense interrogation, and
gazed at the two moveless figures behind the poplar sapling.

The one immediately in front of him absorbed all the Child's attention.
Its great, bulging eyes surveyed him from head to foot, at first with
some alarm, then with half-contemptuous curiosity. Its immensely long
ears see-sawed meditatively, and its queer three-cornered mouth