alked along until he came to
the mortar box.

The mortar man wasn't there. He had gone into the house with a hod of
mortar.

So David looked all about for somebody.

He saw the pile of sand with his hoe sticking out of it, but he didn't
pay any attention to it, for he wasn't thinking about hoes then.

And he saw the bones of the house almost all up, so that they made a
pretty good skeleton, and the carpenters were putting up the rafters:
the beams that hold up the roof.

And other carpenters had just begun nailing boards on to the outside
of the up-and-down beams, and there was a great noise of hammering.

At last he saw the foreman.

"Hello!" David called.

There was such a noise, with the carpenters all hammering, that the
foreman didn't hear him.

"Hello!" called David again, louder.

Still the foreman didn't hear.

"Hello!" David shouted as loud as he could shout. "_Hello, Jonathan!_"

The foreman heard, that time, and he looked around and laughed.

"Ho, Davie!" he said in a big round voice. "Just wait a minute and
I'll be down there."

So David waited a minute, then two, then five minutes, and the foreman
came. Then David asked his question.

"What are the men doing in the road?"

"They're digging a trench. When they get it done, they'll lay water
pipes in it. And the water will come all the way from the reservoir on
the hill, and it will go through pipes that are already laid under the
streets, and it will come to this street, and it will turn into this
street and go along, and some will go into your house, and some will
keep on to this house and go in through a pipe that will be under the
ground just the other side of the sand-pile.

"That pipe will go through the cellar wall, and to all the faucets in
the house, so that when the little boy who will live here wants to
wash his hands or take a bath, he will turn a faucet and the water
will come running. There, now."

"Oh," said David, "will a little boy live here?"

"I don't know who will live here, Davie," the foreman answered. "There
most generally is a little boy or so in any family that lives in this
town."

"Oh," said David; and he nodded his head, and he saw a faucet that was
nailed to a board.

And the faucet was on the end of a pipe which stuck up from the ground
near the mortar box.

"Why," he said, "there's a faucet, and water will come. I've seen the
mortar man get it there."

"Yes," said the foreman. "We had to have wate