Chapter 5

David looked at the house, which stood high on its foundation, and he saw that there was a great hole between the ground and the front steps. He supposed that the graders would fill up that hole.

He nodded.

"I'll get my cart," he said, "and then I'll help you."

So he ran all the way home, and his cat saw him running and she ran too, faster than David ran, and she ran right up on to the piazza.

But David didn't go there. He took up the handle of his cart, and he ran back again.

And his cat saw that she had made a mistake, and she ran faster than ever; and she passed David, and she was running so fast that her bushy tail didn't stick up in the air at all, but straight out behind.

And David came where the foreman was standing, waiting for him, and the foreman showed him where he wanted the rubbish piled to be burned, far from the house.

And the foreman and David worked together, and they piled the rubbish into the cart; and when it was full, they dragged the cart over to the place, and they emptied the rubbish out of it.

Then the foreman took a match out of his pocket, and he scratched the match on his trousers-leg, and he lighted the pile of rubbish.

And a little thin column of smoke went up, and then it blazed, and then it crackled, and the foreman and David went back for another load.

The foreman and David worked for a long time, getting loads of rubbish, and dragging them over to the fire.

Then the foreman would take up the cart, all filled with little odds and ends of sticks and with shavings and with twigs and the ends of laths, and he would turn the cart upside down over the fire, and empty all that stuff out.

Then David would drag the cart back.

The other man was working with a rake all this long time, raking over the places where the foreman and David had been, and he raked the pieces of plaster and the other stuff that wouldn't burn into little heaps.

Suddenly they heard the rattle of the wagon, and they all looked up. And the wagon stopped, and the man who had been driving jumped off, and the horse just stood where he had stopped, and he breathed hard and looked after the man, and he pricked his ears forward.

Then the foreman told the men to get all that stuff into the wagon, and he waved his hand toward the heaps of rubbish that had been raked up.

So the man held out his hand toward the horse, and he whistled, and the horse came, and he followed the men to the farthest pile of rubbish.

And the men took shovels and shoveled the stuff into the wagon in no time. Then they walked along to the next heap, and the horse came after.

And they shoveled that stuff into the wagon, and they walked along to the next heap, and the horse came after.

And so they did until they had shoveled in the last heap; and the horse walked into the road, dragging the wagon after him, and there he stopped.

The foreman and David had picked up all the little odds and ends of things which would burn, and had put them on the fire.

The fire had been blazing up high, but now it wasn't blazing so high, and it was almost burned out.

And the two men stood still, leaning on their shovels, and looked all about.

And the foreman stood still, and he looked all about.

And David stood still, leaning on the handle of his cart, and he looked all about, because he saw the others looking; but he didn't see anything in particular.

The foreman turned to David and sighed.

"Well, Davie," he said, "I guess that'll be about all."

David nodded and looked over to the fire, which was not much more than a heap of red coals and white ashes.

The foreman saw where he was looking.

"The fire'll be all right," he said. "It's about out. Now I'll take just one more look around."

So the foreman walked all around the house, slowly, and he looked carefully to make sure that he had not forgotten anything.

And he looked at the cellar door and at the places where the heaps of rubbish had been, and all around the foundations of the house, and at the great hole under the front steps where the steps didn't come down to the ground, and at the fire last of all.

The fire had all burned out to white ashes, and every swirl of the wind made the ashes fly about.

Then the foreman came where David was.

"Now we're going, Davie," he said. "We'll come back some day to build another house next to this one. Will you help us then?"

"Yes," said David, "I'll help you as much as I can. When are you going to build it?"

"Oh, I don't know," the foreman said, "but I should think it would be before long. Somebody's going to move into this house in a few days. We're much obliged to you for helping us build this."

"You're welcome," said David.

Then the foreman shook David's hand.

"Good-bye, Davie," he said. "Don't forget us."

"Good-bye," said David.

Then the foreman climbed up to the seat of the wagon. The other men were up there already.

And all the men waved their hands, and the horse started.

David stood and watched them until they turned the corner.

Then he picked up his shovel and his hoe and threw them into his cart, and began to walk home, dragging his cart, with his shovel and his hoe rattling in the bottom of it.

And his cat came running, and she ran ahead, with her bushy tail sticking straight up in the air.

And that's all of this story.

XI

THE SETTING-OUT STORY

Once upon a time there was a little boy, and he was almost five years old, and his name was David. And there weren't any other children near for him to play with, so he used to play happily all by himself.

He had his cat and his cart and his shovel and his hoe, and he always wore his overalls when he was playing.

One morning he was playing in the thin woods behind his house.

He had his cart and his shovel and his hoe, and he was walking slowly along, kicking the dead leaves and looking up at the leaves on the trees.

Not nearly all the leaves had fallen from the trees yet, but those leaves that were still on the trees had turned to all kinds of pretty colors: red and yellow and a great many pretty browns which looked alive. And some leaves were red and yellow together, and some were still green with red and yellow spots on them, and some leaves had not changed their color at all, but were green all over.

And the squirrels were very busy hunting chestnuts and they didn't pay much attention to David.

Suddenly there was a great scurrying, and every squirrel went racing up the nearest tree, and David's cat came running, with her bushy tail sticking straight up in the air, and she ran a little way ahead of David, and she flopped over on her back in a little pile of leaves, and she began playing with the leaves.

David laughed at her. "Funny kitty!" he said.

Then he turned and went on talking, but he wasn't talking to his cat and he wasn't talking to himself.

His pretend playmate had come, and it was the boy, this time, and he had brought the cat.

So David and that pretend little boy played together for a long time.

Sometimes they dragged the cart together, and sometimes they stopped and hunted for chestnuts, and they put into the cart the chestnuts that they found.

And after a while they came into that part of the woods which was behind the new house.

And David heard some men talking together up at the new house, and he looked and saw them squatting down beside the house, and two of the men had shovels.

So David and the pretend little boy hurried to go to the new house, to see what the men were doing, and they dragged the cart, and the shovel and the hoe and the chestnuts all rattled about together in the bottom of it; and the cat went running on ahead.

But, when David got there, the pretend little boy had gone, for David had forgotten about him.

And David stopped a little way from the men, and looked about.

The grading men must have got their work all finished, for the ground all about didn't look at all as it had when the foreman and David had left it.

There weren't any signs of the rubbish, and the dirt was up higher on the foundation in a nice straight line, and it sloped down to the field all around, and it had been made all smooth.

David wondered about the great hole that was under the front steps, and he went around there and looked, and the hole wasn't there any more, but the ground came up to the steps, and a man was raking gravel smooth, to make a front walk like the one that went into David's house.

David didn't say anything, and the man didn't say anything either, but kept on raking.

So David went back to the place where the men were, with the shovels.

Those men were digging a round hole in the ground, about big enough for David to sit in and stretch his legs out straight.

And when they had the hole dug, another man came, carrying a little tree.

There were a whole pile of little trees out near the road, and they all had their roots tied up in bagging, or a kind of coarse cloth.

The tree which the man was carrying was a little Christmas tree. He had taken the cloth off of the roots, and he was cutting off, with his knife, some of the ends of roots.

Then he put it in the hole, carefully, and the men spread the roots out all around in the bottom of the hole, and they sifted some dark-colored dirt all about them, and they worked it in between the fine roots with their fingers, and they pressed it down hard.

The man who had put the tree in was holding on to it all the time, so that it should grow up straight.

And when the roots were all right and the dirt was pressed down hard, he let go of the tree and took up the end of a hose that was lying on the ground, right behind him.

David hadn't noticed the hose before. It came from a shiny hose-faucet, and the hose-faucet stuck out of the house just above the foundation, halfway along the side.

The man let water run from the hose into the dirt that had just been put around the roots of the tree, and he let it run for a long time.

And when the top of the hole was just a puddle of mud, he stopped the water and dropped the hose, and the men scattered a little dark-colored dirt that was dry over the top of it.

That dark-colored dirt is called loam, and it is the best kind of dirt to make things grow.

David saw that from the house down to where the path would be to the back door was already covered with the same dark-colored dirt.

The other side of the path was nice and smooth, but it looked sort of raw and the dirt was a yellow color.

Just beside the road was a great pile of dark-colored dirt, and there was a two-wheeled cart backed up to the pile, and a man was shoveling the dirt into the cart.

When the cart was filled, the man tossed his shovel on top of the dirt and started walking along.

"Come along, Jack," he said.

The horse had had his ears pricked forward, and when the man said that, he started and followed the man to the end of the yellow dirt.

There he stopped, and the man took his shovel off the cart and threw it on the ground. And he took the backboard out of the cart, and he put his knee on the cart, and the top tipped back and slid all that dirt out in a heap on the ground.

Then the horse walked along two steps, and the man took his shovel and scraped out what was left in the cart, and he tipped the top of the cart back again and he put the backboard in.

And he got up into the cart, and the horse turned around and walked back to the pile to get another load.

David wanted to ask somebody some questions about the dirt, but he didn't know any of the men, and they all seemed to be very busy.

So he just watched; and he saw another man come, and he had a shovel, and he spread around the dirt in the heap that the cart had just dumped until it was pretty even and smooth.

And the horse came, bringing another load, and that was dumped, and the man spread that around with his shovel.

David went nearer, and the man saw him.

"Are you going to plant some little trees?" David asked.

"We're going to sow grass seed here," the man answered, "when this is all covered with loam."

Then another load of loam came, and he was busy with his shovel, and David went back to watch the other men plant trees.

They were planting more little Christmas trees near that first one, five trees in a kind of a clump, and David watched them dig the holes and put the trees in, and spread the roots about, and put dirt on them, and stamp the dirt down hard, and put the water in.

And when the Christmas trees were all planted, they put another kind at the back corner of the house.

Then they went to the front corner of the house, and one of them said that there was the place for the lilac bushes.

And he got the lilac bushes and cut off a part of the roots while the other men were digging the holes, and they planted the lilac bushes in the holes, but they didn't do it so carefully as they had with the other kinds of trees.

And when they had the holes filled up and the water turned off, and the planting of lilac bushes all finished, they stopped and leaned on their shovels and looked around, to see what else they had to do.

The loam was all over the yellow dirt, and the last load was just being spread around.

So some of the men went to get the grass seed. That grass seed was in green bags.

And they took up bags of grass seed and began walking slowly along over the ground, and they took up handfuls of the grass seed and scattered it in the air so that it fell evenly over the ground.

And they sowed the seed all among the trees they had just planted, and all over the smooth dirt, and wherever they wanted the grass to grow; but they didn't sow it in the paths.

Then two other men came, and they were dragging a great heavy stone roller behind them.

It was so heavy that the two men had to walk very slowly, each dragging it by one handle.

And they went to and fro over the ground where the grass seed had been sown, and they rolled it down smooth and hard and shiny.

Before the roller men had got through, the others had gone and put on their coats and gathered up their tools; and David knew that they were through their work.

So he went where he had left his cart, and he looked for the pretend little boy, but he had gone away, and David couldn't find him. And he looked for his cat, and he couldn't see her either.

So he took up the handle of his cart, and he walked along to his house, dragging his cart, with his shovel and his hoe and the chestnuts all rattling together in the bottom of it.

And that's all.

XII

THE POLE-MEN STORY

Once upon a time there was a little boy, and he was almost five years old, and his name was David. And there weren't any other children near for him to play with, so he used to play happily all by himself.

He had his cat and his cart and his shovel and his hoe, and he always wore his overalls when he was playing.

One morning he had just started to wander along the road toward the corner of the next street.

He wasn't allowed to go beyond that corner, but he could look and see what was coming, and perhaps he could see the postman and the black dog.

His cat was walking along beside him, looking up into his face, and he was dragging his cart, with his shovel and his hoe rattling in the bottom of it, for he might want to play in the sand of the gutter.

But before he got more than halfway to the corner, he heard a great rattling and shouting, and two horses came around the corner.

They made a very wide turn, because they were dragging a wagon, and behind that came two great logs which looked like trees, except that they were all smoothed off.

And David wondered where the other ends of the logs were, for he couldn't see anything but logs coming around the corner.

Then came a pair of strong wheels that the logs rested upon, and presently there were the other ends of the logs, and David knew that the logs were either telephone poles or electric light poles, for he had seen a great many of both kinds.

There was a man driving, and two other men, and they had some other smaller poles and some shovels in the wagon.

David stopped short, and his cat stopped, and they watched the wagon, with the poles behind it, go slowly down the road until it had got a little way beyond his house.

Then it stopped, and the men jumped out, and they began to look up in the air.

David wondered why they were doing that. He wondered so much that he walked along, with his cat walking beside him and his cart coming after, to ask the men.

But before he got near enough to them to ask, they had stopped looking up in the air, and they talked to each other, and David knew by what they said that they had been looking to see where the telephone line to his house stopped.

Then they started the horses, and the men walked beside them, and they walked about as far as a big boy could throw a stone, and there they stopped.

And the men undid the ropes from the long logs, and they rolled one of them to one side and tipped it so that its big end was on the ground, and they tied the ropes on to the other log again.

Then they got two of the smaller poles from the wagon, and they held up the small end of the log with the small poles; and the wagon started and the wheels went out from under the log and left it.

Then the men took away the small poles and the log fell upon the ground, and it made a big booming noise as it fell.

The other log was unloaded in the same way not far from the corner of the new house, and they led the horses to a tree and tied them; and they took the shovels and all the little poles and the other things out of the wagon.

The shovels were strange-looking things, with long, straight handles and queer blades, more like long mustard-spoons than shovels; and the little poles had sharp spikes in the ends, and some of the poles were not much longer than clothes-poles, and some were a great deal longer; and there were two sharp-pointed iron bars.

The men took all their things to the place where the first pole lay on the ground, and two of them took bars and the other took one of the shovels.

And the men with the bars stuck them into the ground and loosened the dirt, and the other man scooped out the dirt with his big mustard-spoon. Then some more dirt was loosened and that was scooped out with the shovel.

The hole that they were digging was not much bigger around than the end of the pole which would go into it.

The hole kept getting deeper, so that a common shovel wouldn't have got up any dirt at all; but the man with the mustard-spoon shovel just gave it a little twist, and lifted it out with dirt in it.

Pretty soon they had the hole dug deep enough.

It was so deep that, if a man could have stood on the bottom of it, he could have just seen out, if he stood on his tiptoes.

But only a slim man could have got into the hole. A fat man would have stuck fast as soon as his legs were in.

Then the men put down their bars and the shovel, and got the little poles, and went where the long log lay.

And they rolled it over with bars which were something like tongs, except that they had only one handle; and they rolled it until the big end of the log was just over the hole.

Then they took the shortest small poles with spikes in the ends, and they put them where they could reach them quickly.

And they all took hold of the end of the log and lifted it as high as they could reach; and one of the men reached out quickly for his spike pole, while the other two men held the log, and he jabbed the spike hard into the log and held it while another man got his spike pole and jabbed the spike hard into the log.

Then the third man jabbed the spike of his pole in, and they all lifted together, and the butt end of the log slipped a little way into the hole.

It couldn't go all the way to the bottom, because the big pole wasn't up far enough yet, and the butt end struck the side of the hole.

Then they got longer spike poles, one man at a time, and they lifted again, and the big pole slipped a little farther down into the hole.

And one of the men jabbed his spike pole in at another place, and then the other men did, and they lifted again, and the big pole went _thump!_ on the bottom of the hole.

And the men left their spike poles sticking in, all around, and jammed the other ends into the ground to hold the big pole up straight while they filled in the dirt around it.

David had been watching the men all the time, but he was careful not to get near, because he had seen how the big pole bounced around when it was unloaded.

His cat was not so careful, and she was almost hit by one of the spike poles when the man threw it down, and she scampered home as fast as she could go.

But David didn't pay any attention to her, and the men were too busy to notice.

When the dirt was pounded hard around the pole, the men took up their things, and walked along to the place where they had unloaded the other pole; and David walked along, too, dragging his cart.

He would have liked to take some of the things in his cart, but they were all too big, for he asked one of the men.

And the man looked at his cart, and he looked at David, and he laughed and shook his head.

"But you be very careful not to get too near," he said. "If the pole should get away from us, there's no knowing what it would do."

"Yes," said David. "I was careful."

"So you were," the man said. "You do the same way while we set this pole."

So the men set the other pole, and David stood a long way off.

He stood so far off that he couldn't see very well, and when the men had the pole straight up in the air, he wandered over to the wagon and tried to see if anything else was in it.

The backboard was up and he couldn't see inside at all, but he saw the wheels that the poles had come on, and he thought he would try to shin up on them and look in.

So he put his arms around the axle and tried to get one leg over; but as soon as he took his foot off the ground, the wheels began to go. He put his foot down again and made the wheels go faster, hanging on to the axle with his arms and paddling on the ground with his feet, for the ground sloped a little.

And when the wheels had rolled gently down to the lowest part of the road, they stopped and David couldn't make them go any more, even when he pushed as hard as he could.

But the men had got through setting the pole, and they were going over to the wagon when David rolled down the road and couldn't get back.

And they all went where he was, and one of them pushed on the axle, and David pushed, and the wheels rolled back again to the wagon.

And the men let down the backboard, and they put in all their things: all their poles and the bars and the shovel.

Then they took out a big coil of something that looked like rubber tubing which was wound on a great wooden spool.

The spool was as big around as David's body, and the stuff that looked like rubber tubing looked all twisty, as if there were two pieces twisted together.

David wanted very much to know what it was. He didn't like to ask, but the man who had it saw that he was looking at it very hard.

"Do you know what that is?" he asked, smiling at David.

David shook his head.

"Is it a little hose?"

"No, it's wire, and the wire is covered with that black rubbery stuff. See, here are the ends."

He found the ends of the wire and showed them to David. There were two bright ends of copper wire, and they peeped out of the black rubber covering.

"There are two of them, you see, and they are twisted together."

David nodded, but he didn't say anything.

The other men were buckling on to their legs some iron spurs, or climbers, just like those the tree men had.

And when they had their climbers buckled on, they took a little coil of rope and some queer little wooden things and a big hammer, and they went to the nearest pole.