Part 19 (1/2)

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.