the beams.

And when they got to the right place, they both stooped over and
looked down between the beams, through a great big square hole. A
chimney would come up through the hole, and the bricklayers were
building it.

The little boy was surprised to see how enormous a chimney had to be
at the bottom.

There were four men laying bricks as fast as ever they could, but it
was all the little boy could do to watch one of the men.

First, he took up a brick from the pile, with his left hand, and he
generally tossed the brick up a little way in the air, and it turned
over before he caught it again, so that he saw all sides of it; and,
with the flat trowel which he held in his right hand, he scooped up
some mortar.

And he slapped the trowelful of mortar down on the bricks where he
wanted to put that other brick, and he gave a little wipe with the
trowel around the edges, and he pressed the brick that he was holding
in his left hand down into place, and he tapped the brick with the
handle of the trowel, and the mortar squeezed out all around, and,
with his trowel, he scooped off the mortar that had squeezed out, and
he slapped that down in a new place.

Then he began again, and reached down for another brick.

The little boy was so busy watching the bricklayer that he forgot all
about the masons who were putting mortar on the wall.

But, pretty soon, all the men said something to all the other men, and
they stopped laying bricks, and they began to take off their overalls.

"What are they going to do now?" the little boy asked.

"They are going to eat their dinner," said the foreman. "Come on."

So the foreman and the little boy got down on the ground again, and
the foreman set the little boy down, and he took his hand, and they
went back, near the pile of sand, where there were some nice boards to
sit on.

And the men all came trooping out of the cellar, and each man went and
got his dinner from the place where he had put it when he came there
in the morning.

Some of the men had their dinner in pails and some had theirs in
baskets and one man had his in a newspaper, so that he wouldn't have
anything to carry home at night.

And the men came where the nice boards were, and they sat around
anywhere, and they opened their pails and their baskets and the
newspaper bundle, and they began to eat their dinners.

The little boy had sat down, too, but he didn't feel very comfortable.

He thought that, perhaps