House construction -- Juvenile literature; Readers (Elementary)
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account