"They're going to lay the pipes now, Davie. Do you want to see them do it?" So David put his little hand into the foreman's big one, and they went together to where the men were. The men had got up out of the trench, and they were going to take up one of the iron pipes that lay in the gutter. Just as they began to lift it, out of one end of it popped David's kitty. She scurried around and popped into the end of another pipe, and all the men laughed. "Funny kitty," said David. Then the men took hold of the pipe that the cat had been in at first, and they lifted it, one at each end, and they carried it and put it down beside the trench. [Illustration: OUT POPPED DAVID'S KITTY] Then they got into the trench again, and they took hold of the pipe and lowered it to the bottom. David couldn't see what the men were doing then, and he went to the edge of the trench and squatted there and watched. He saw the end of a pipe sticking out of the ground into the trench. It looked as if it had been in the ground a long time. "What is that?" he asked the foreman. The foreman said it was the end of the old pipe, and there was a place near his house where they could put a long iron thing into the ground, down as far as the pipes, and turn it and let the water into this pipe. The long iron thing was like a clock-key. "And Davie," he said, "you see that one end of each pipe flares out bigger than the other end. The men put the small end of one pipe into the flaring end of the next. You'll see." So David looked and the men fitted the small end of the new pipe into the flaring end of the old one, and they blocked the new pipe up with dirt and stones until it was just right. Then one of the men took some things that were in the trench. All that David saw was what looked like some old frazzled-out rope, and he laid the things he had taken up around the new pipe in the joint, and he hammered them in tight with a kind of a dull chisel. That was so that the water shouldn't leak through. When the men had the old frazzled-out rope all hammered in tight, the other man came and brought him something that looked all snaky, and it was shiny like the lead of a pencil, and it waved about as if it were heavy and it seemed to be all moist like mud. And the man took this snaky, wavy thing, and he wrapped it around the pipe, and he drove it into the joint until it looked like a part of the pipe. Then he felt it all over carefully, and he stood up and looked at it. And he made up his mind that it was all right, and the other man began to shovel dirt down into the trench, and they punched the dirt until it was all hard under the pipe and at the sides. Then they went to the gutter and picked up another pipe. The foreman couldn't wait any longer. "I've got to go now, Davie." "Where have you got to go?" David asked. "Can I go with you?" "I've got to go into the house. I can't take you in there yet. I'm afraid you'd get hurt. In a day or two you can go in."